A workable gold day trading routine has five steps: check the macro calendar for CPI, NFP and FOMC, pick the session where gold is actually moving, size the position from the dollar distance to your stop, execute only your pre-defined setup, then journal every XAUUSD trade so the record can tell you which session and direction actually pay.
A repeatable gold day trading workflow runs in five steps: check the macro calendar for CPI, NFP and FOMC before the session, select a trading window from the hourly XAUUSD volatility profile rather than watching all day, size the position from the dollar distance between entry and stop at 00 per .00 move per standard lot, execute only pre-defined setups with a location, trigger, invalidation and target, and journal every gold trade for weekly review.
Session selection matters because gold concentrates its daily range into the London open and the New York overlap, and because the broker-verified GoldHunts record shows a 66.6% win rate across 10,337 New York trades against 61.1% across 4,565 Asian session trades.
The end-of-day review is what makes the routine compound: tagging each XAUUSD trade by session, setup and whether it was pre-defined exposes which session and direction are carrying the damage, which is usually a bigger improvement than any new strategy.