The gap family in gold

By the XAUUSDLiveChart Research Desk · 5 min read

Gap is one word covering at least three different animals in gold. The Sunday reopen gap is closed-market repricing. The intraday jump is thin liquidity meeting a large order or headline. The fair value gap is an imbalance inside a fast three-candle sequence during continuous trading. They form for different reasons, so treating them with one rule, usually the folk rule that all gaps fill, wastes the distinction.

Weekend reopen gaps

Trading halts Friday evening and reopens Sunday evening US time; accumulated weekend news prices in one print. These are the only true no-trading gaps in gold. Their edges, Friday close and Sunday open, become reference levels, and their interiors, having no built structure, often trade through quickly when entered. Details live in the weekend gaps guide.

Thin-liquidity jumps

During holidays, rollover minutes or shock headlines, price can leap between prints with almost no trading between levels. These jumps mark where the book was empty, and empty books refill unpredictably; wait for structure to rebuild before trusting any level inside the jump.

Imbalance gaps

When a displacement candle leaves daylight between candle one's extreme and candle three's extreme, the untraded span is an imbalance, widely called a fair value gap. The market often revisits part of that span to transact where it previously could not, which is the honest basis of the FVG playbook: partial revisits into the zone, not mystical full fills.

On fill folklore

Given enough time price revisits most areas, which makes every gap-fill claim true eventually and useless practically. The workable version: expect revisits when the gap came from thin conditions rather than genuine repricing, and let each gap type's mechanics, not a slogan, set the expectation.

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