Market Watch in gold trading

Market Watch is the quotes panel in MetaTrader that lists the symbols you can see, with their bid, ask, spread and daily change. It is also the entry point to the symbol specification, the one-click trade panel and the tick chart.

How it applies to gold trading

If gold is missing from your charts, it is usually hidden in Market Watch. Right-click, choose Symbols (or Show all), search for XAU or GOLD and add the variant with your account’s suffix. Right-clicking the symbol and choosing Specification shows the contract size, digits, minimum and maximum lot, lot step, swap long and short, and trading sessions, which are the facts every position size and cost calculation needs.

Market Watch can also show the spread column. Watching it at rollover and around data releases is an easy way to see how wide gold’s spread really gets.

Worked example

Example (hypothetical numbers): Market Watch shows XAUUSD 4,003.15 / 4,003.42. The spread is $0.27, or 27 points on a 2-digit symbol. The specification lists contract size 100, minimum volume 0.01, step 0.01 and swap long -6.50 per lot. With those numbers you can work out that opening and closing 0.10 lots costs about $2.70 in spread and $0.65 per night in swap.

The same window holds the Details tab on mobile and a tick chart on desktop, useful for checking whether a price spike was real or a single bad tick.

A common mistake

Calculating costs from a number read off a website rather than from your own symbol’s specification. Each platform’s figures differ.

See also: Symbol suffix, Bid, ask and spread, Contract size, Swap and rollover.

Frequently asked questions