I had a friend of a friend talking to me about Broker time conversion. I am new at this, about 6 months and I have only used one broker. He was saying something about different market times and the need to convert broker time. My question is what is this? Why you need to do it? And I guess how to do it? Any insight would be great, thanks for your time.
I am not exactly sure what your friend referred to, but different brokers may use a different server time which you can locate (and in some cases change depending on your broker) in your trading platform. It can create different candle stick patterns as the times will be different.
Why do you need to do it?
You don’t, but it all depends on the way you trade.
Yes, he said server time can be different for brokers. My question is, this might be newbie of me, why does that matter? If there time is 2am and another broker server time is 6am why would that matter? I can still trade the same pair with relativity the same price. I know there spread might be different. I am just not understanding why server time is important and why you would need to convert it. And convert it to what? The traders local time I am assuming.
Anybody have any ideas?
More to do with daily candles - broker A may close a daily candle at perhaps 10GMT, and broker B may close a daily candle at perhaps 12GMT. So both candles could have a different open, high, low and close - some people get annoyed with this as it makes trading less consistent when comparing with other outside price feeds.
Hi, [I]Tablecritter[/I]
The replies you got from [I]TheLastBear[/I] and [I]Jezzode[/I] are correct.
There was a recent thread in the [I]Forextown[/I] forum that discussed this issue. Check out this post and this post.
In Jason Rogers’ post, he discusses the advantage of dividing each trading week into [B]5 equal, 24-hour, DAILY candles[/B] — which is the result of opening/closing each daily candle at 5pm New York time, as FXCM does.