What XAU/USD is, precisely
XAU is one troy ounce of gold. USD is the US dollar. XAU/USD is therefore the number of dollars one troy ounce costs, quoted to two or three decimals. Nothing about the contract is synthetic, and nothing is derived from a basket, an index or a formula we invented.
Which second settles your order
The settlement price is the mid price at the exact expiry second, taken from the published feed and stored as a snapshot you can retrieve later. Not the last trade, not a rounded average, not the price at the nearest whole second we felt like using.
Session hours
Spot gold trades from Sunday 22:00 to Friday 21:00 UTC, with a daily break around 21:00 to 22:00 UTC. Orders cannot be opened while the market is closed. Existing orders that would expire during a closure settle on the first available quote afterwards, and the snapshot will say so.
Why spot and not futures
Futures contracts expire, roll, and carry a basis against spot. If your one-minute order settles on a futures price, you are exposed to a roll schedule you never agreed to. Spot has no expiry and no roll, so the price you watch is the price that settles you.
Is the price the same as on other sites?
It should be within a few cents. Different venues publish slightly different spot quotes, which is exactly why we name ours and store the snapshot. If your other screen disagrees by more than a spread, check the timestamp first.
What if the feed goes down?
Orders are paused. We do not fall back to a second source, because a second source is a different price and would make two identical orders settle differently. During an outage this page and the status page both say so.
Do I own any gold?
No. You are predicting the direction of a price, not buying metal. There is no custody, no vault, no delivery. Anyone who tells you a one-minute binary order gives you ownership of gold is selling you something else.
Minimum order is one dollar?
Yes, on the practice account the floor is one dollar. The point of a low minimum is that you can test your own discipline with real rules before the amounts matter, not that you should trade a thousand one-dollar orders.