How far back does gold tick data go?

The XAU/USD tick series in this archive starts 2003-05-05. Daily candles reach further back (1999-06-03), so studies that only need candles have several more years to work with.

What columns does a gold tick file contain?

timestamp, bid and ask — one row per quote update, timestamps in UTC. Mid price, spread and any candle timeframe are all derivable from those columns; a "last traded price" column does not exist in two-way spot quoting.

Does gold tick data include volume?

The candle exports for gold carry a volume column; at tick level the row is the quote update itself. For most gold research the bid/ask pair is the datum that matters — it is what any fill would actually have happened against.

Do I need a higher licence tier for tick data?

No. Every tier reaches every timeframe over the full history, tick included — tiers differ by software features (export formats, batch queueing, automation), never by data. The entry licence is €9, one-time.

Gold Tick Data (XAU/USD): What You Get, and How Big It Is

By Martin Buessler · Published 16 August 2026 · Updated 17 September 2026 · 3 min read

Tick data is the highest-resolution record of the gold market this archive carries: every quote update, bid and ask, timestamped to the millisecond. It is also the easiest dataset to underestimate — people request "all the gold ticks" and meet a multi-gigabyte download. This guide covers exactly what a XAU/USD tick file contains, how far back it reaches, what it costs in disk and time, and when you genuinely need it.

Get the app — €9 →

A finished MarketData Hub download: a CSV file on local disk, with its row count, file size and full path. — **Where the data ends up.** A finished job names the row count, the file size and the exact path — a folder you chose, with no server of ours in the picture.

What a gold tick row is

A tick file carries timestamp,bid,ask — one row per quote update, timestamps in UTC. There is no "last traded price" in spot forex-style quoting: XAU/USD is a two-way quote, and the mid, the spread and any candle you like are all derivable from these two columns. That direction only works one way — candles cannot be un-aggregated back into ticks — which is the whole case for ever downloading ticks.

How far back gold ticks go

The XAU/USD tick archive starts 2003-05-05, while daily candles reach back to 1999-06-03 — the tick series is years younger than the candle series on the same symbol, the usual tick-vs-daily gap. The practical reading: an execution-sensitive study of gold has its effective history start at the tick date, whatever the instrument page's headline start says.

How big the files get

From the same coverage model the instrument page uses:

Timeframe	History from	Approx. rows	Approx. CSV
Tick (every quote)	2003-05-05	very large	—
1 second	2003-05-05	very large	—
1 minute	2003-05-05	~8.5M	~423 MB
5 minutes	2003-05-05	~1.7M	~85 MB
15 minutes	2003-05-05	~564K	~28 MB
30 minutes	2003-05-05	~282K	~14 MB
1 hour	2003-05-05	~141K	~7 MB
4 hours	2003-05-05	~35,300	~2 MB
Daily	1999-06-03	~6,900	~343 KB
Monthly	1999-06-03	~330	~16 KB

Tick and 1-second downloads run as queued, resumable jobs in the app rather than one long fetch — a connection drop resumes instead of restarting. Sizing logic in the file-size guide.

The session shape, in the ticks

Spot gold trades close to 23 hours a day, Sunday evening to Friday evening UTC, with a short daily break — so tick density is not uniform: quiet Asian-morning stretches and dense US-session bursts are both normal, and the weekend is simply absent. Missing weekend rows are market structure, not gaps in the archive. If you aggregate ticks into your own candles, decide the daily cut-off deliberately — different platforms cut the gold "day" at different hours, which is why two correct gold charts can disagree.

Ticks or candles for your use case?

Spread-sensitive strategies, fill simulation, microstructure work — ticks, no substitute: the bid/ask pair at the moment of action is the datum.
Signal research over years — minute or hourly candles; the tick download is disk and time spent on resolution the study never looks at.
Both, eventually — a common pattern: prototype on 1-minute candles, confirm the final strategy's entries against ticks over the shorter tick-era window.

Getting the ticks

In the desktop app, pick XAU/USD, the Tick timeframe and a date range — the app plans the fetch, retrieves on your machine straight from the source archive, and writes CSV or JSON where you point it. Every licence tier reaches the full tick history; tiers differ only in software features (from €9, one-time). For working with the result, see Python & pandas or SQL over Parquet with DuckDB. The same tick timeframe is available for every instrument in the precious-metals catalogue, silver included.

Frequently asked questions

How far back does gold tick data go?: The XAU/USD tick series in this archive starts 2003-05-05. Daily candles reach further back (1999-06-03), so studies that only need candles have several more years to work with.
What columns does a gold tick file contain?: timestamp, bid and ask — one row per quote update, timestamps in UTC. Mid price, spread and any candle timeframe are all derivable from those columns; a "last traded price" column does not exist in two-way spot quoting.
Does gold tick data include volume?: The candle exports for gold carry a volume column; at tick level the row is the quote update itself. For most gold research the bid/ask pair is the datum that matters — it is what any fill would actually have happened against.
Do I need a higher licence tier for tick data?: No. Every tier reaches every timeframe over the full history, tick included — tiers differ by software features (export formats, batch queueing, automation), never by data. The entry licence is €9, one-time.

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