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AUDUSD has a loose relationship with gold, because Australia is a major gold producer. When gold surges, the Aussie often gains. The link is far from tight.

The relationship works better over weeks than over seconds. Intraday, the two can move independently. There are windows in which they correlate strongly, and others in which one reacts and the other ignores.

For a scalper, a gold chart on the side can add context. A sharp gold move at the London fix, which is a pricing benchmark in the gold market, sometimes spills over to AUDUSD within seconds. Or the reverse: a USD move drives both.

It's mostly a dollar story. When the dollar weakens, gold and AUDUSD both tend to rise, and the correlation looks like a link between them when the common driver is the dollar.

A better test is to compare AUDUSD and gold on days when the dollar index was flat. Any remaining co-movement is more likely to reflect a direct link.

Few traders do this, and most rely on the vague notion that "Aussie follows gold". Plotting the two over a month on a one-minute basis shows how weak or strong the relationship actually is.

Has the gold-AUD link been useful on short timeframes, or just a story?

I was a believer in the Aussie following gold for years, mostly because it was the first thing I read when I started. When I finally plotted the two on one minute bars across a couple of months, the result was humbling. On most days the link that looked strong was really just both of them moving against the dollar.

The test of flat dollar days was the one that settled it for me. On those days the correlation dropped to almost nothing on short timeframes. There were a few exceptions around the London gold fix, where a sharp move in gold seemed to spill into the Aussie within a few seconds, but it wasn't consistent enough to trade by itself.

I still keep gold open on a side screen when I trade AUDUSD, but only as context. If gold breaks sharply and the dollar is quiet, I'll pay more attention to longs. Otherwise I treat the Aussie and gold idea as a nice story rather than an edge.