Today my broker’s system went down and came back intermittently.
I find this quite worrying, I suppose nobody can truly have 100% uptime but it’s a bit disconcerting.
In addition to this, every day at around 5pm in New York their system goes off for a brief period. I had assumed this was for rollovers although I wonder if all or most brokers have this disconnect at rollover time?
Is it normal behaviour?
Yes it is normal when rollover takes place at NY close. In addition you’ll also see spread widen at this time, but, the offline and spread widening is for around 5 mins. FXCM used to show this quite clearly in their historical spread charts, for information purposes.
Although I don’t use FXCM, it was a good visual representation of rollover taking place during each NY close.
It’s essentially the ‘close of a trading day’ per say.
It depends on where your broker is based and which is the time zone of the platform and the server. But as RISKonFX explained, the rollover time of most brokers matches the NY closing.
What concerns me is that you mention that the whole system went down which I’m not sure if it’s entirely normal. Do you mean that there was a discrepancy with their servers, did the platform stop? Maybe there was a technical issue? Usually during the rollover there are slight delays in the execution and the spreads are quite widen but I don’t think that the whole system should be down.
The historical chart is definitely a good visual representation of rollover. The other typical period I would point out is the market open on Sundays.
Many banks will briefly shut down and reset their servers during rollover, and those that remain active widen their spreads. I can’t speak for other brokers, but their is no closing of trading during the rollover period but spreads can be wider as displayed in the historical chart.
Jason
As a reminder when viewing any past historical spread data, past performance is not indicative of future results.