Forex brokers truth: Trading platform time zones

If you tried trading with at least two Forex brokers, you may have already noticed that every Forex broker has own time zone settings for thier trading platform?

Having data displayed in the right time zone is crucial for many aspects of Forex trading.

Daily and weekly charts can easily have different values and price ranges if a new daily candle on one trading platform appears at 00:00 GMT, on another platform 2 hours later at 00:00 GMT+2, and on the third platform 5 hours earlier at 00:00 GMT-5 (EST)

If you are using automatic pivot points, they will be calculated according to your time zone and daily candles. As a result — your support/resistance levels will be different form what other traders may have. If you are trading daily breakouts, your breakout entry points will differ from other traders’ orders.

And finally, every single indicator can behave differently. Enough, I think.

There are many nuances of that; an exception could be maid only for intra-day trading: starting from 1 hour time frame and lower you won’t care much about time zones (except for pivot points levels, and may be few other studies).

Have you ever been into a situation where, once you’ve changed a broker, your old strategy seemed to start performing worse or even failed completely?

When discussing trading systems on forums, some traders report amazing results while other traders while being 100% disciplined in trading can’t achieve any similar performance… I wonder why… ^^

Time zone settings on majority of Forex trading platforms cannot be changed. Some brokers use this factor to their advantage. Instead of picking for their trading severs the most common time zone(s), where the largest Forex markets operate: London (GMT) or New York (EST), brokers choose other time zones, like GMT+2, +3 etc.

I can’t explain why they do it. Except, probably, for those brokers who decide that platform time zone should be the same as the location of the company. But I’ve seen unexplainable cases, when broker company is, say, in New York, and they set time zone for their platform (randomly?) at GMT+6… Why would you do that? Probably to make sure no strategy works well under this conditions…

I can sound overly cautious and concerned with those time zones, but it doesn’t eliminate the fact that the platform’s time zone plays a significant role in one’s trading success way to often to be completely ignored!

You can change the time zone in the Platform’s settings, so that it shows the hours you want, BUT the server time, which the platform operates on doesn’t change. A new day starts and ends according to the server time anyway. When I switched over from a GMT+0 Metatrader 4 platform to another one with offset like GMT+1 or GMT+2, my decisions are affected. Sometimes, I miss an opportunity due to the different ways the candlesticks are displayed using different time offset.