Server time, local time and logs that do not line up

[Amanhasnoname]

Reviewing a trade journal and finding the news-spike entry "at 15:30" when the release was at 14:30 local is a time zone problem, not a trading problem. Three clocks are usually involved: the broker server clock, the PC clock and the timestamps in whatever tool exports the data.

Many brokers run server time at GMT+2 in winter and GMT+3 in summer, following US daylight saving rules. The catch is that US and European clock changes happen on different dates, so for a couple of weeks in spring and autumn the offset between server time and London time is off by an hour compared with the rest of the year. Sessions that looked stable on the chart quietly move relative to the server day, and so do daily candles, rollover and the spread spike around it.

The journal tab in the platform often uses local PC time, while the trade history uses server time. Mixing the two in one spreadsheet gives clean-looking nonsense.

The fix is boring but works: convert everything to UTC in one column on day one, record the server offset used for every date, and flag the weeks around clock changes. Then session statistics mean what they claim to mean.

Is the trade log stored in UTC, or in server time with the conversion done later?