Contiguous Intraday Trading Windows Across Risk-Reward Geometries: Evidence from Bullish Engulfing Trades in XAUUSD M15

This study examined how contiguous intraday trading windows varied across direction and risk-reward geometry for unfiltered Bullish Engulfing events in XAUUSD M15. The analysis used 5,639 events recorded from 24 April 2023 through 1 July 2026 and evaluated a complete 50-configuration universe comprising BUY and SELL directions, five risk settings, and five reward settings. Each configuration was assessed independently using an all-hours baseline, 24 hourly performance buckets, a predefined qualification rule, a controlled fallback procedure, contiguous-window detection, day-level and week-level consistency measures, and recent 30-day and 7-day comparisons. A qualifying boundary was identified in 21 of 50 configurations (42.0%). Ten configurations satisfied the requested rule directly, 11 required fallback relaxation, and 29 produced no qualifying boundary after the full search. BUY boundary prevalence was 56.0%, compared with 28.0% for SELL. BUY boundaries were distributed across morning, midday, late-evening, and midnight-crossing windows, whereas SELL boundaries were concentrated around 12:00–15:00. Changes in risk and reward altered both boundary existence and timing. Configurations sharing the same nominal risk-reward ratio did not necessarily share the same boundary status or selected hours, indicating that absolute geometry remained material. Historical profitability also diverged from recent evidence: no selected boundary was positive in both the recent 30-day and recent 7-day windows. The findings show that contiguous intraday opportunity was selective, direction-dependent, and conditional on absolute risk-reward geometry. A Bullish Engulfing event did not support one universal trading window across all tested configurations. Direct, fallback, and no-boundary outcomes should therefore be distinguished, and historically favourable windows should be treated as hypotheses for independent validation rather than live-trading conclusions. Bullish Engulfing events were generated using a proprietary rule-based framework. The exact event-identification logic is withheld to protect trade-secret research methodology. This paper is part of the Market Setup Analytics Research Paper Series.