Points, pips and the confusion tax
Gold quotes commonly carry two or three decimal places, so a 'point' can mean one cent or one tenth of a cent depending on the broker. Any strategy configured in points rather than currency will silently run at ten times or one tenth of its intended risk when moved between brokers with different digit conventions.
Contract size and value per point
Margin, stop level and the fields nobody reads
- —Margin requirement on gold often changes ahead of weekends and major events. Budget for the higher figure.
- —Stop level defines the minimum distance for stops and limits from current price. A high value can block valid trades.
- —Freeze level prevents modification of orders close to market. It causes 'invisible' modification failures.
- —Filling mode determines whether partial fills are permitted, which changes how your order manager must behave.
Read every one of these fields before running anything live at a new broker. It takes four minutes and prevents the category of problem that presents as 'the strategy stopped working' when in fact it never got permission to start.
Reading the specification before the chart
Two brokers can quote what looks like the same gold contract with different contract sizes, tick values, minimum stop distances and margin requirements. Every one of those differences changes the currency value of a point, which changes lot sizing, which changes your actual risk — regardless of what the configured percentage says.
The five fields that matter
Symbol suffixes, quote precision and quiet breakage
Gold appears as XAUUSD, GOLD, XAUUSD.m and a dozen other variations, sometimes with three decimal places and sometimes with two. A system that assumes one naming convention or one precision will either refuse to trade or, worse, compute a stop distance that is off by a factor of ten and place it perfectly confidently.
Defensive symbol handling
- —Read contract properties from the terminal at runtime rather than hard-coding them.
- —Normalise prices to the symbol's actual digit count before comparing levels.
- —Refuse to trade if the specification cannot be read, rather than guessing.
- —Re-verify the specification after any broker platform upgrade.
Everything discussed here is applied on a public, third-party verified account — updated continuously, losing weeks included.