Market Profile on Gold Futures (GC): Reading the COMEX Open and London Fix

By Deeyana Angelo ~25 min read Last updated: June 2026

Why most market profile guides fail you on gold

If you've learned market profile from the books and the standard online guides, you've learned it on the S&P 500. Steidlmayer wrote about indices. Dalton's examples are mostly equity-index examples. Every modern market profile blog you can find defaults to ES or NQ when it picks a chart. The result is that traders who try to apply that knowledge to gold futures end up confused.

Gold doesn't follow the ES rhythm. The gold trading day starts in Tokyo, not New York. The first hour after 9:30am ET isn't even the most important hour for GC. The 80% rule has a different hit rate. The point of control behaves differently. The day type frequencies are dramatically different — trending days happen on GC roughly 45% of the time, compared to 5-10% on equity indices, based on 8 years of our own research. There's a 10:00am ET event most retail gold traders have never heard of that consistently bends the second half of the GC profile. And there are two structural dead zones in the gold day where almost nothing tradeable happens — including the one most traders treat as significant.

This is a guide to reading the GC profile on its own terms. It assumes you already know what an initial balance, value area, and POC are — if those terms are new, start with the foundations post, Market Profile on Futures, which covers them from scratch. What follows is what changes when the underlying is gold futures rather than an equity index.

The full gold session in seven phases (and three of them are dead zones)

The gold day is structured. It's not random ranging punctuated by the New York open — it's a sequence of distinct phases, most of which have repeatable behavior, and several of which have almost no tradeable edge for the day-trader. If you mark your charts with the right phase boundaries, the rest of this guide will make sense. If you don't, you'll keep getting chopped in windows that aren't supposed to produce setups in the first place.

Here are the seven phases in chronological order, walking through a full 24-hour gold session from the Tokyo open through the COMEX close. Times are given in BST (UK) and ET (US East Coast) — both shift slightly with DST, so treat them as anchors not stopwatches.

Phase 1: Tokyo open — the wrong-way fake-out (~1am BST / ~8pm ET prior day)

The Tokyo open is the first liquidity event of the gold day. The pattern is unusually consistent: gold opens, makes an immediate directional push, and then reverses. The initial push frequently turns out to be the wrong direction relative to the eventual Asia-session range.

Why this happens: Tokyo opens with a thin order book and macro-positioning flow from Japanese institutions and dealers covering or initiating positions before the Shanghai open. That positioning is rarely the "real" direction for the Asia range — it's noise that gets reversed once deeper liquidity arrives. Treating the Tokyo open's first move as a directional signal is one of the most common ways to start the gold day on the wrong foot.

Phase 2: Pre-Shanghai shakeout — Asia range extreme #1 (~2am BST / ~9pm ET prior day)

This is the first structurally meaningful event in the gold day. In the 30-60 minutes before the Shanghai open at 2:30am BST, gold typically prints one extreme of what will become the Asia session range — either the Asia high or the Asia low.

Two distinct reads on what's happening:

• The shakeout reversal: an exhaustion bar (long wick into the extreme, narrow body) followed by one or two medium-volume bars reversing the move. This is the "wrong-way trade getting flushed" signal — Tokyo's directional push gets unwound, the extreme prints, and Asia begins to build its range in the opposite direction.
• The institutional breakout: a very-high-volume bar in the direction of the move, with a strong body close, no immediate reversal. This is the rarer signal — genuine institutional momentum building before Shanghai gets fully online. When this prints, the move usually continues through the rest of Asia and frequently into the European session.

The first read produces most pre-Shanghai prints. The second read is rarer but high-conviction when it occurs. Telling them apart in real time comes down to volume context: medium-volume reversal = reversal; very-high-volume continuation = trend.

Phase 3: Tokyo lunch return — Asia range extreme #2 (~4:30am BST / ~11:30pm ET prior day)

Tokyo takes a lunch break from approximately 3:30am-4:30am BST. When Tokyo returns from lunch, the gold market frequently establishes the opposite extreme of the Asia session range. If the pre-Shanghai shakeout printed the Asia high, the Tokyo lunch return tends to print the Asia low — or vice versa.

By 4:30-5:00am BST, the Asia high and Asia low are usually both on the chart. The Asia range is now defined and becomes a structural reference for the rest of the session. Anyone trading the Asia-range fade or breakout setups built on what we call the final hour of Shanghai — a session-structure framework that gets its own dedicated post later in this series — is operating off this established range.

Phase 4: The dead zone — London morning + AM fix (~9am-11am BST / ~4am-6am ET)

After the Asia range is set, gold goes through a quiet post-Asia window (roughly 5am-9am BST) and then enters a structural dead zone proper from approximately 9am-11am BST. The London cash session has been open since 8am BST but the gold-specific behavior between 9am and 11am BST is overwhelmingly range-bound. Most days, GC simply oscillates inside the Asia range with low conviction and low volume.

This window includes the London AM gold fix at 10:30am BST (~5:30am ET). Despite its name and institutional significance for physical settlement, the AM fix is statistically a non-event for the intraday trader. Volume around the AM fix is muted, directional persistence after it is weak, and the post-fix window blends seamlessly into the rest of the quiet morning. You will hear other guides telling you to mark the AM fix on your charts. For intraday GC, you can safely ignore it. If anything significant happens around the AM fix, it's usually because a separate macro headline coincided with it — not because of the fix itself.

The dead zone runs until roughly 11:00-11:30am BST when the overlap awakening begins. Setups taken in the 9-11am BST window have lower hit rates than the same setups taken later in the day. Most experienced GC day-traders treat this period as either a charting/preparation window or a session to sit out entirely.

Phase 5: The London/NY overlap awakening (~11:30am BST / ~6:30am ET)

This is where gold wakes up. Roughly two hours before the COMEX pit open, the combined liquidity of the late London session and US pre-market traders coming online creates the first sustained directional movement of the European day. Volume picks up, ranges expand, and price starts to choose a side.

The 11:30am BST overlap awakening is the structural inflection point for European-hours gold trading. If you're trading from London or Europe and you want to participate before the COMEX open, this is the window to start watching closely. Asia-range breakouts that have been pending all morning frequently resolve here. Volume confirmation in this window is genuinely informative — unlike volume signals during the dead zone, which are noise.

Phase 6: The COMEX floor open (8:20am ET / ~1:20pm BST)

This is the open. Gold and silver both open on the COMEX pit at 8:20am ET, and the volume signature is unmistakable. The bar covering 8:20am ET will routinely show 3-5x the volume of the preceding bar.

The 8:20am ET timing dates back to the old open-outcry COMEX trading hours. Pit trading is gone, but the institutional clock isn't — desks, miners, ETFs, and macro funds still cluster their highest-volume gold transactions in the 8:20am-9:00am ET window because everyone else is also clustering there. That self-reinforcing liquidity concentration is the reason 8:20am ET still anchors the gold RTH session even though the trading floor itself closed long ago.

If you're going to mark a single initial balance on GC, the COMEX open is the anchor. Not 9:30am ET. The 70-odd minutes between 8:20am ET and 9:30am ET aren't dead time — they're often where the day's directional bias gets established. The detailed IB treatment is in the next section.

Phase 7: The London PM gold fix (~3pm BST / 10:00am ET)

The London PM fix is the pricing event most retail traders ignore and most institutional traders watch. It's the moment the London Bullion Market Association (LBMA) determines the afternoon reference price for physical gold settlement.

Critically, the PM fix coincides almost exactly with the FX NY cut — the 10am ET expiration of daily FX option contracts. The NY cut isn't a gold event in itself, but it triggers massive institutional rebalancing in DXY, EUR/USD, and USD/JPY positions, and gold trades against the dollar. The combined effect of the PM fix completing AND the NY cut completing in the same 15-minute window is one of the most consistent intraday catalysts in the GC session.

The PM fix itself is an auction process that runs around 3:00pm London time. In the 30 minutes before and the 30 minutes after the PM fix, GC consistently shows one of four patterns:

• Compression and pin (the most common): price tightens into the fix and consolidates within a narrow range as institutional flow neutralizes
• Direction reset: a morning trend in GC pauses, breaks, and reverses through the fix window
• Acceleration: a setup that was developing in the morning extends decisively through the fix as physical-settlement flow joins the directional move
• Extension-then-reversal: a morning IB extension of roughly 1x IB size completes into the fix, then reverses sharply once both the PM fix AND the NY cut have cleared — the structural drivers of the morning trend evaporate within the 10:00-10:15am ET window and rotation back into value takes over

The fourth pattern is the most common variant of the third — what looks like "acceleration through the fix" frequently turns into a high-probability rotation once the post-fix unwind begins. It's the most important Phase 7 pattern to recognise, and we discuss it among the structural setup categories below.

Trading GC without knowing where the PM fix sits on the clock is like trading ES without knowing where the FOMC announcement is. Most retail GC traders don't mark it on their charts. You should — unlike the AM fix, the PM fix is genuinely structural and the PM fix + NY cut combination is the single most reliable intraday catalyst on GC.

Phase summary at a glance

Three of the seven phases — most of the London-only window — are statistically dead zones for the intraday trader. Five are tradeable. Knowing which is which is the foundation everything else in this guide builds on.

The Asia phases (1-3) and the Asia-range resolution (5) deserve a full post of their own, which will land later in this series as The Final Hour of Shanghai. The rest of THIS post focuses on phases 6 and 7 — the COMEX RTH session — which is where the bulk of market profile work on GC happens.

Initial Balance on GC: why 8:20am ET, not 9:30am ET

The initial balance is the first hour of the session. On ES, the first hour is 9:30am-10:30am ET because that's when institutional equity flow starts. On GC, that hour is 8:20am-9:20am ET — because that's when the old open-outcry COMEX gold pit used to open, and even though the pit closed years ago, institutions still cluster their highest-volume transactions in that window. Volume creates volume: desks position around 8:20am ET because everyone else positions around 8:20am ET, and that self-reinforcing concentration is the reason the timing has persisted into the electronic era.

You can mark either window and call it "the IB" — but the predictive value is different. The 8:20am ET IB on GC tells you something real about institutional positioning. The 9:30am ET IB on GC mostly tells you what happened in the first hour after gold had already been trading for 70 minutes.

This isn't a minor distinction. It changes which setups even exist.

IB width on GC: wider than ES, with more noise inside it

GC tends to print a wider initial balance relative to its average daily range than ES does. Where ES might form an IB that's roughly 35-45% of its average daily range, GC's COMEX-based IB regularly forms at 45-60% of ADR. The structural reason: ES has fewer institutional opens stacked into one moment (the cash equity open is THE event), whereas GC has overnight Asia inventory, the London/NY overlap flow, futures arbitrage, ETF rebalancing, and COMEX pit-time positioning all flowing through the first 60 minutes after 8:20am ET.

The practical consequence is that GC's first 60 minutes are messy. More participants pulling in opposite directions inside the IB means more head-fakes — sharp pushes toward the IB edge that get rejected, false breakouts that reverse hard back into the range, and developing-POC migration as different desks try to establish where they want value to settle. If you treat every push toward IB high or IB low as a directional signal during the first 60 minutes on GC, you'll get chopped.

This has two practical implications:

• The IB itself is the signal, not the moves within it. Wait for the 60 minutes to close out before acting on IB-based setups. Trading inside the developing IB on GC is a recipe for head-fake stops.
• A "narrow IB" on GC is a stronger signal than a narrow IB on ES. When GC prints an IB that's only 25-35% of ADR, you're seeing genuine compression despite all that institutional positioning trying to spread the range. Compressed IBs on GC very often resolve into directional trend days, and the first IB extension is high-probability.

The 90-minute IB variant

Some GC traders use a 90-minute IB (8:20am-9:50am ET) instead of 60 minutes. The argument for it: gold often has a "second wave" of institutional positioning around 9:00am ET as US macro desks join in alongside the COMEX flow. By extending to 90 minutes you capture that second wave inside the IB, which produces a more stable reference range.

The argument against: a 90-minute IB drops your sample size for IB extensions (there's less time left in the session to extend). On a trend day, the 60-minute IB will signal earlier.

Pick one and stay consistent. Our preference is 60-minute IB for active intraday work and 90-minute IB only as a secondary reference for swing-style decisions.

Value area behavior on GC: why the POC is stickier than on equities

Gold has a structurally stickier POC than equity indices. By "stickier" I mean: once the developing POC settles at a level during the first half of the session, it's less likely to migrate substantially during the second half on GC than it is on ES.

The structural reason is ETF arbitrage. The relationship between GC futures and GLD (the SPDR Gold Shares ETF) is enforced by basket arbitrage — when GC futures dislocate from the implied GLD price, market makers compress the gap by trading both sides. The same basket arbitrage operates between GC and physical gold via the LBMA settlement process. Combined, these two arb processes create a constant gravitational pull keeping GC anchored to a slowly-moving reference price.

On ES there's also arbitrage (between ES futures, SPY ETF, and SPX cash), but the underlying composite — 500 stocks each trading independently — is much noisier than gold's underlying physical commodity. The result is that ES POC migrates more freely during a session, while GC POC tends to settle once and hold.

The 80% rule on GC: when it works

The 80% rule from Dalton's framework states that if price opens outside the prior session's value area, then re-enters and holds inside for two consecutive 30-minute TPO periods, there's roughly an 80% probability price travels through the value area to the opposite extreme.

On ES the 80% rule has been studied extensively and the actual hit rate is more like 70-75% — close enough to the textbook figure to be useful. On GC the rule's hit rate is meaningfully lower, but it's still useful when you filter for one specific condition: the 80% rule works on GC primarily when the re-entry happens before the London PM fix at 10:00am ET.

If GC opens outside the prior value area at 8:20am ET, re-enters by 9:30am ET, and confirms acceptance by 9:50am ET (two full 30-minute TPOs), you have a high-probability rotation toward the opposite value area boundary, often completing before the PM fix begins compressing things.

If GC opens outside the prior value area but doesn't re-enter until after 10:00am ET, the PM fix dynamics tend to dominate the next two hours of price action and the "rotation through" pattern breaks down. The setup is still tradeable but you should target the POC rather than the opposite VA boundary. Full value rotations that happen early are unreliable statistically on GC.

The London PM fix and value area extension

The PM fix is also when GC most commonly extends its value area in one direction. If the morning IB and the first 60-90 minutes of post-IB trade have built a balanced profile, the PM fix often catalyzes a value migration that adds 30-50% to the range in the next 60 minutes.

The setup is recognizable in real time: balanced morning profile + a directional 10-15 minute move just before 10:00am ET = value migration extension high-probability. Position accordingly.

Day type frequencies on GC vs equity indices

Dalton's day-type classification gives you a useful shorthand for what kind of session you're in. The frequency of each type differs dramatically between GC and ES — and on GC the difference is much bigger than most traders realise.

The 45% trending day figure for GC is from Market Stalkers' own research over 8 years of RTH sessions. The other frequencies are qualitative observations from extended live trading and should be treated as approximations pending further validation.

The strategic implication is significant. If you've been treating gold like an equity index — assuming trending days are the rare exception and most sessions are range-rotation affairs — you've been mismatched to the instrument roughly half the time. On GC, the trending day is closer to the base case than the exception.

The two things to take away:

Trending days dominate GC more than most traders appreciate. Gold has clean macro catalysts — inflation prints, geopolitical risk, central bank decisions, dollar moves, real-yield shifts — that produce true single-direction days roughly 45% of the time. If your morning IB on GC sets up with confirmed single-sided extension and you see clean structure, lean into it harder than you would on ES. You're not catching a rare trending day, you're catching the most common day type. The flip side: fading single-sided extensions on GC is structurally wrong about half the time. The failure mode of treating gold like a range-rotation instrument is constant.

Normal Variation Days are still common. This is the day type where IB extends once in one direction (typically by ~2x IB range), pauses, but doesn't reverse — it just consolidates the new range. These days are tradable but punish over-aggressive targets. On GC specifically, the 2x IB extension is a respectable target on Normal Variation Days, and traders who hold for 3x extensions often give back substantial open profit. The distinction between a Normal Variation Day (consolidate after 2x extension) and a Trending Day (keep extending past 3x) is one of the most consequential reads on GC — it determines whether you're scaling out at 2x or trailing a runner to 3x+.

The London-driven trend day is a special case worth flagging. This is the pattern where the European morning session establishes a directional bias before COMEX opens, GC opens with that bias intact, and the US session simply extends what London started. When you see GC up or down a notable amount at 8:20am ET versus the prior day's RTH close, the probability of a Trending Day in the same direction is elevated — and given that 45% of GC days are already trending days as a baseline, the conditional probability when London has already set a bias is materially higher than that.

Where the structural edges live in the GC session

The structural map above (the seven phases, the IB dynamics, the value area behaviour, the day type frequencies) reveals four categories of recurring intraday condition on GC. Below is each category described at the structural level — the condition to recognise, why the structure produces an edge, and roughly when in the session it tends to appear. The actionable execution layer lives behind the paywall.

Category 1: The compressed-IB resolution

Structural condition to recognise: Initial Balance forms at materially below average width despite the COMEX-open institutional flow trying to spread the range. A narrow IB on GC is structurally unusual because of how many participants are active in the first 60 minutes — when compression survives that pressure, it's a coiled-spring condition.

Why the structure produces an edge: Compression against the natural widening force of institutional positioning means no real two-sided trade got established. When the compression resolves directionally with volume confirmation, the move tends to extend cleanly because there's no built-up opposing inventory to absorb it.

Typical timing window: The setup is recognisable once the 60-minute IB has fully formed (around 9:20am ET) and the directional resolution typically develops between 9:20am ET and the PM fix at 10:00am ET.

Category 2: The balanced PM fix initiation

Structural condition to recognise: Morning profile has built a balanced structure with no decisive IB extension by 9:50am ET. Price is oscillating around the developing POC as the PM fix + NY cut window approaches at 10:00am ET.

Why the structure produces an edge: The PM fix and the FX NY cut both complete at 10:00am ET. When morning structure hasn't committed to a direction by the time these settlement events arrive, the directional initiation that begins in the late-9am window is typically led by physical-settlement and FX-hedging flow positioning for the cut. The post-fix continuation tends to be persistent because the catalyst behind the move is structural rather than reactive.

Typical timing window: Initiation visible between 9:45am ET and 10:00am ET; directional follow-through usually plays out between 10:00am ET and 11:00am ET.

Category 3: The extended PM fix + NY cut reversal

Structural condition to recognise: Morning IB has produced a clean directional extension of approximately 1x IB range in one direction. Price is at or near the extension extreme as the PM fix + NY cut window approaches at 10:00am ET. This is the most common Phase 7 outcome on days that opened with directional bias and is the practical translation of the extension-then-reversal pattern.

Why the structure produces an edge: Both settlement events (PM fix and NY cut) complete at 10:00am ET, removing the structural drivers of the morning extension within a 15-minute window. With the catalysts gone, the natural rotation back into value takes over. The 1x IB extension is the sweet-spot signal — extensions much beyond this typically indicate trending day conditions where the reversal doesn't develop, and extensions much short of this usually didn't build enough exhaustion to reverse cleanly.

Typical timing window: The condition becomes recognisable between 10:00am ET and 10:15am ET; rotation back into value typically plays out over the following 30-90 minutes.

Category 4: The Asia rebalance (two variants)

Structural condition to recognise: One of two related patterns built around the same rebalance mechanic.

• Variant A — Asia displacement rebalance: Overnight Asia session has moved GC notably (more than 50% of recent average daily range) away from the prior RTH value area. COMEX opens at 8:20am ET with price still outside the prior value area.
• Variant B — Asia liquidity grab rebalance: The Asia range held overnight, then price briefly grabs liquidity by spiking above Asia high or below Asia low, fails to follow through, and rotates back into the Asia range. This is one of the highest-conviction patterns on GC when it develops around the overlap awakening or shortly after the COMEX open.

Why the structure produces an edge

This is not an "Asia is less informed" story — since the early 2020s, Asia session moves on GC are routinely as substantial as RTH moves and the old "thin overnight" framing no longer applies. Both Asia and US institutional flows are genuinely participatory; they just hold different views, and the views flip session to session.

What also holds: COMEX represents the deepest single concentration of gold liquidity in the day (futures, options-on-futures, ETF arbitrage desks, US macro positioning, basket arbitrage with GLD). When non-equilibrium overnight conditions arrive at the COMEX open — whether that's price displaced from RTH value (Variant A) or a liquidity grab beyond the established Asia range (Variant B) — the deeper COMEX liquidity pool frequently enforces a rebalance, expressing the next leg of the inter-session chase. It works because the COMEX liquidity pool is structurally distinct from Asia's, not better than it, and the post-grab or post-displacement equilibrium often sits inside the established overnight range rather than at the extreme.

Typical timing window: The early read on Variant A comes in the first 30 minutes of COMEX trade (8:20am-8:50am ET). Variant B can develop during the overlap awakening window (~11:30am BST onward / ~6:30am ET) or at/shortly after the COMEX open. Both variants' rebalance typically resolves over the rest of the morning.

These four categories cover the bulk of recurring intraday conditions on GC's RTH session. Recognising the structural setup is the educational half of trading gold well. Translating that recognition into executable trades — with the right entry criteria, stops, sizing, and live confluence checks — is a separate skill that requires deliberate practice and ongoing calibration against current conditions. That's the second half of the work, and it's what the Market Stalkers Method teaches end-to-end across 59 lessons.

What doesn't work on GC (the dead zones and other traps)

Gold has two structural dead zones in its 24-hour cycle. Both look superficially tradeable — there's volume, there's price movement, there are "setups" — but the historical hit rates inside these windows are materially worse than the same setups taken in active phases. Knowing where they are is half the battle.

Dead zone #1: The London morning + AM fix (~9am-11am BST / ~4am-6am ET)

This is the worst window in the gold day for the intraday trader. The Asia range is set, US institutional flow hasn't woken up, and European flow alone isn't enough to push gold into directional moves. Statistically, GC is range-bound during this window — usually trading inside the Asia range, occasionally probing an Asia extreme then reverting.

The London AM fix at 10:30am BST (~5:30am ET) sits squarely inside this dead zone. Despite its institutional name, the intraday volume and directional persistence around the AM fix are weak. Treating the AM fix as a tradeable event is one of the most common mistakes new GC traders make based on advice from generic guides that lump it together with the PM fix. The AM fix is not the PM fix. The PM fix at 10am ET is structural. The AM fix at 5:30am ET is noise in the dead zone.

The first reliably tradeable European-hours setup on GC is the overlap awakening at 11:30am BST (Phase 5 above). Until that point, the highest-edge action is preparation, not execution.

Dead zone #2: The US lunch-hour void (~12pm-2pm ET)

Between the PM fix wind-down (around 11:00am ET) and the start of the late-session repositioning (around 2:00pm ET), GC has a second liquidity void. Volume per bar drops materially, spreads widen, and price action becomes whippy in ways that don't reflect real positioning. Setups taken in this window have noticeably lower hit rates than the same setups taken in the morning or afternoon.

This isn't a rule that requires backtest validation — it's visible on any GC volume profile chart. The middle of the US session is structurally quiet for gold.

Trading GC profile in isolation from GLD context

GC and GLD are tied by basket arbitrage. If GC is breaking out and GLD's options chain shows substantial call gamma at a strike that translates to a GC futures level just above your breakout, you're trading into structural resistance you didn't see on the futures chart alone. Conversely, when GC and GLD gamma walls align with a profile reference level, the confluence is strong.

You don't need to subscribe to a paid gamma service to incorporate this. The free workflow for GC + GLD gamma confluence will be covered in a future post in this series.

Using the equity-style RTH VWAP anchor on GC

VWAP is a tool most traders inherit from equity markets where the standard anchor is 9:30am ET. On GC, the equity-style RTH-anchored VWAP is effectively useless. By 9:30am ET, gold has already been trading for 70 minutes of high-volume COMEX flow, and the RTH VWAP for the first hour of its existence is built off near-zero volume — it tells you nothing about where institutional value actually sits.

What does work on GC: the Globex-anchored VWAP, set at the futures session open (~6pm ET the prior evening, when CME Globex reopens for the next trading day). The Globex VWAP captures the full overnight inventory build — Asia accumulation, European hedging flow, pre-COMEX positioning — and that aggregate is genuinely informative as a mean-reversion reference once RTH gets going.

The specific pairing where Globex VWAP earns its keep: as a mean-reversion target after an Asia high or Asia low swipe. When price grabs liquidity beyond an Asia extreme, fails to follow through, and starts to rotate back, the Globex VWAP frequently acts as a natural magnet for the rotation. This is the same structural setup discussed as Category 4 Variant B above — the Asia liquidity grab rebalance. The Globex VWAP gives you an objective reference for "where the post-grab rotation is most likely to settle."

The takeaway is the inversion of the equity intuition: on ES, the RTH VWAP is the dominant intraday reference. On GC, the RTH VWAP is noise and the Globex VWAP is the reference that does the work.

How GC differs from copper, silver, and other metals

Gold isn't the same instrument as copper, silver, platinum, or palladium even though all five trade on COMEX. The session-specific behavior described above is GC-specific.

Briefly:

• Copper (HG) has a totally different open structure — LME ring trading is the dominant institutional reference, not COMEX. The IB on HG needs to incorporate LME timing. The dedicated companion post on copper futures market profile covers exactly this.
• Silver (SI) has overlap with GC in terms of COMEX timing but its overnight Asia liquidity is much thinner, which changes overnight inventory dynamics and the reliability of Asia-to-COMEX setups.
• Platinum (PL) and Palladium (PA) have low enough volume that market profile analysis on them is mostly noise. Stick to the liquid four (GC, SI, HG, and selectively PL).

The point of this post is gold-specific. The point of the companion post is copper-specific. Together they should give you the foundation for trading the metals with structure-aware setups.

Frequently asked questions