Guide / Home and sessions

Data and the clock

A price file has times but no time zone, so the app has to be told which clock they are on.

It matters because anything defined in real time depends on it: which market session a trade belongs to (London, New York, Asia), and what hour and weekday it falls on. If your file is in Kenyan time (UTC+3), then 15:30 in the file is 12:30 UTC, which is New York. Read as if it were UTC, the same trade would look like London's afternoon.

Choosing it

• When you import, the confirm step asks What clock are these times on? The default is Kenya (UTC+3, no daylight saving). The list is grouped by region, with 37 zones: UTC, a MetaTrader broker's server time (GMT+2 in winter, +3 in summer), fixed GMT+2 or GMT+3 for brokers that never change, and cities across Africa, Europe, the Americas, the Middle East and Asia, and the Pacific, from Lagos and Johannesburg to Chicago, Hong Kong and Auckland.
• MetaTrader exports are usually in the broker's server time, not your own. If unsure, compare the first rows of the file with a chart you trust.
• Data imported earlier has no clock recorded, so it is assumed to be Kenyan. Open New session, find Data clock in the left pane, and set it to the right zone. It says when it is only an assumption.

Changing it later

Changing the clock never touches the candles: the digits in the file are the same either way, only their meaning is corrected. It is saved with the dataset, so every session, chart and analytics view on that data follows at once. Nothing needs re-importing.

What it changes