Spot Gold Rolling Higher-Timeframe Candle Flow, Long/Short (XAUUSD.SPOTMETAL 1-HOUR: enter when the rolling 24-bar candle's body exceeds k x H1 ATR, exit when that rolling candle changes colour, intrabar ATR protective stop)

Derived by the Research Lead from the MQL5 Code Base indicator 'Timeframe Flow' (https://www.mql5.com/en/code/36346). The source draws a user-chosen higher-timeframe candle (for example a D1 candle on H1 charts) at EVERY bar, together with current-timeframe ATR bands, and suggests crosses of the midline (open + close)/2 as exits. It states no entry threshold, sizing or market. In this operationalization, on XAUUSD.SPOTMETAL 1-HOUR MID bars (Dukascopy, history from 2003) I compute at each closed H1 bar a ROLLING higher-timeframe candle over the last N H1 bars (baseline N = 24, about one trading day). Its open is the open of bar t-N+1 and its close is the current close. N counts bars, not clock time, so weekend and 17:00-18:00 NY break closures are skipped and are not treated as gaps. Signal strength is the rolling body measured in current-timeframe ATR units: S = (HTF_close - HTF_open) / ATR_H1(14). We go LONG when S >= +k and SHORT when S <= -k (baseline k = 3.0), meaning a day-scale directional move that is large relative to hourly noise. The position exits when price crosses the rolling candle's midline. Because the midline includes the current close, close < (HTF_open + HTF_close)/2 is the same as the rolling candle turning bearish (close < open of bar t-N+1); the short case mirrors this. That is the source's midline-cross exit, implemented causally. An intrabar protective stop at entry -/+ stop_atr x ATR_H1 (baseline 4.0) is placed as a reduce-only stop-market order. The platform matches it inside the bar in backtest and paper, and live mirrors those fills; no exchange-resting order is required or claimed. Next-bar-open execution on this session venue is native (next_open_fill: supported): a decision on bar N's close fills at bar N+1's open. Positions may be held overnight and pay or receive the modeled SPOTMETAL financing at every 17:00 NY roll (long pays fed funds + 2.5%/yr, short receives fed funds - 2.5%/yr, Wednesday x3); this cost is part of the test. Why gold and why now: corpus concentration is BTC-heavy, and SPOTMETAL holds 0.3% of all experiments. Prior gold tests covered session breakouts (Asian range / London open), GVZ variance-premium regimes, macro-driver (real-yield) trend, PAXG basis and gold/silver ratio. None tested the plain price-based intraday-to-daily trend persistence documented for gold and other futures in time-series momentum work (Moskowitz-Ooi-Pedersen 2012; Hurst-Ooi-Pedersen 2017). This also follows lesson L219: a separately justified directional-momentum test with an instrument-specific, pre-registered expectancy, on a market with much lower cost than crypto (about 0.015% RT spread, zero commission). This is NOT another crypto dual-timeframe confluence clone: the instrument, venue, cost structure and session calendar all differ.