How to backtest XAUUSD on the 15-minute chart

Fifteen-minute candles remove much of the micro noise while keeping the session transitions intraday traders care about. Breakouts, pullbacks, range failures, and reversal structures usually have enough room to be defined before the outcome is visible.

Mark the prior day high and low, obvious 4-hour structure, and the session open before advancing. Those references keep a 15-minute signal from becoming a trade in the middle of nowhere.

• Define trend or range before looking for the trigger.
• Use the same close-based confirmation rule every time.
• Record distance to the next higher-timeframe obstacle.
• Skip trades whose target runs directly into nearby structure.

An average win rate can hide that a setup works on expanding trend days and fails inside narrow ranges. Tag the market condition before the trade result is known, then review each group after the sample is complete.

After the first sample, change only one thing: the entry confirmation, session window, stop rule, or target rule. Run the new version on unseen dates. A cleaner second test teaches more than repeatedly tuning the same historical winners.