Why your broker's daily candle never lines up with other charts

[Shadow Trader]

Two traders discuss "yesterday's high" and quote different numbers. Neither is wrong. The daily candle depends on where the broker puts the day boundary.

Many brokers align the daily bar with 5pm New York, which leads to a server time of GMT+2 in winter and GMT+3 in summer. Others use midnight GMT, or midnight in their own country. Some switch daylight saving time at a different date from the one used in the United States, which creates a few weeks each year when the candles shift by an hour.

Anything relying on the daily open, daily high, or "first hour of the session" is affected. Opening-range breakouts, session-based indicators, and pivot calculations all move depending on the server clock.

A scalper using the first fifteen minutes of London as a reference needs to know exactly which bar that is on a given broker's chart. Mixing timestamps from two platforms is a good way to build a rule that works on one and fails on the other.

A simple habit helps: put a visible clock on the chart in a fixed timezone, and verify it twice a year when clocks change.

Which time offset does your broker use, and has it ever caused a mismatch?