so for this trade, I mainly used corrolations and essentially common sense to predict this trade as gold has so many ties with everything you can really miss it. in other words its one of the big players in the world of finance which pushes various markets in all directions and causes a lot of volatility in them. for 1 I noticed that it slightly went into consolidation after a nice strong uptrend which shows whats an 9 ASCENDING TRIANGLE pattern so this gave me the reassurance to go long on my position. I also used the RSI indicator to see whether the direction of gold will continue in the way that it already is and it confirmed that it will. but the main reasons were correlations because its the most simple ones and are the efficient. meaning there most likely to work. if one goes up the other goes down. a very simple strategy that has worked a lot for me. for me, instead of XAU/USD, I think of it as XAU/DOW JONES or XAU/S&P 500. THANKS