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Gold is less forgiving there because it moves so much faster in percentage terms on US data. A hot CPI or a strong payrolls number can push XAUUSD 20 or 30 dollars within minutes, and if the H1 trend was pointing the other way, you're fighting the dollar and real yields at the same time. On EURUSD the same surprise might be 40 pips, which a reduced-size M15 trade can usually survive.

For gold specifically there's a further condition I use: no new scalps in the half hour before a US release, regardless of alignment. The spread widens and the move after the print tends to ignore whatever structure was there.

The reduced-size exception on EURUSD makes sense as long as it is genuinely the exception and you're tracking it separately, so you can see whether those trades earn their place.

No H1 alignment, no gold trade — same rule. EURUSD sometimes gets reduced size on excellent M15 location; gold punishes that shortcut too fast.

Skipping H1 on XAU is a different system wearing confluence language.

Agreed that skipping the H1 at the London open makes it a different system. One way to handle it is to treat the first 30 to 45 minutes of London as a separate playbook with its own journal tag. Then the sample for the full three-layer checklist stays clean, and the open has its own results. After a couple of months it becomes clear whether the momentum version is worth trading at all, instead of blending its results into the main strategy and making both harder to judge.