Silver leading gold for five minutes: trade or ignore?

[LondonScalper]

Silver moving first and gold following a few minutes later is something I see mentioned a lot. For my trading, it is mostly something I ignore.

I tracked it for about three months. Every time XAGUSD made a clear move of more than half its average five-minute range and gold had not yet followed, I wrote down what gold did over the next ten minutes. The result: sometimes gold followed, sometimes it did not, and sometimes silver reversed instead. Nothing close to reliable enough to trade, especially once spread on gold is taken into account.

The cases where it seemed to work better were when both metals were already near a shared level, such as a session high. In that situation silver breaking first was occasionally a decent early sign. But that is a level trade with an extra confirmation, not a lead-lag strategy.

So my rule is: five minutes of silver leading is not a signal on its own. I need a pre-marked level on gold and more than a few minutes of divergence before it even makes my notes.

If someone here has a larger sample on intraday metal lead-lag, I would like to see it. Mine is too small to be sure either way.

[Fairman]

Every time XAGUSD made a clear move of more than half its average five-minute range and gold had not yet followed

How did you decide that gold had not yet followed, and were both prices from the same feed? Lead-lag studies on one-minute data can create or hide a lead just from timing. If silver is checked at the close of a bar and gold on its next bar, a few seconds of normal delay can look like a minutes-long lead. Different quote frequencies matter too, since a broker may update silver less often than gold. A cleaner version would compare both on the same broker feed, at fixed timestamps, measured as a share of each metal's own five-minute range. Was that close to how you logged it, or was it more from watching the charts live?

[Shadow Trader]

LondonScalper, your three month sample matches what I saw when I logged 60 silver lead events on the same broker feed. Gold followed inside ten minutes in 22 cases, did nothing useful in 24, and silver reversed first in the other 14.

Fairman's point about fixed timestamps is why those numbers are even usable. Early on I was reading silver at the M1 close and gold a few seconds later on a different quote pace, and that alone invented leads that vanished once both prices came from one clock.

img_13414_r1.png (44.44 KiB) Viewed 2 times

The illustration breaks those 60 events into the three outcomes above. Follow through was barely above a coin flip, and that is before gold spread.

Where I still watch is your shared level case. When both metals sat within a few ticks of the London high, silver breaking first led gold nine times out of the fourteen such events in my log, which is better but still a level trade with a hint, not a lead lag system.

Did your sample improve at all when you required both metals to be near a pre marked session extreme? Mine did, but not enough to promote it beyond a note.