MT4/MT5 server time vs. your local time

The daily candle on your MT4 chart does not close at midnight where you are. It closes on the
broker’s server time, and the two are usually four or five hours apart. If you
trade the daily timeframe or care about swap, that gap changes your results.

What server time is

Every broker runs its servers on a chosen time zone, most often GMT+2 or GMT+3
(Eastern European time). The reason is practical: that zone makes the daily candle close as the New
York session ends, which splits the week into exactly five daily candles.

Vietnam is GMT+7. So with a GMT+3 broker, server time runs four hours behind
local time — the daily candle closes around 4am in Vietnam, not at midnight.

Four places the offset causes trouble

• Daily and weekly candles. A “day” on the chart is not a day on your calendar.
  The patterns you see will differ on a broker in another time zone.
• Overnight financing. Swap is charged at the daily candle close on server time.
  That is why Wednesday night is charged triple —
  and “Wednesday night” means the broker’s Wednesday, not yours.
• The economic calendar. Release times are usually published in GMT or US time.
  Convert them wrongly and you enter at the wrong moment — see
  how to read the economic calendar.
• Sessions. The four session open times marked on a chart are server time, while
  the 7–10pm window for traders in Vietnam
  is local. Don’t mix the two systems.

How to find your broker’s server time

1. Open MT4 or MT5 and look at the Market Watch window — the time column there is
   server time.
2. Compare it with your computer’s clock to get the offset.
3. Write it down. It is stable, except where the broker observes daylight saving — and many do, so
   re-check at the end of March and the end of October.

The time axis under the chart is also drawn in server time. That is the source of the “my candle
closed at 4am” confusion that many traders assume is a platform bug.

One thing to watch when you switch brokers

Move to a broker in a different time zone and every chart from the daily timeframe up will
look different — same pair, same period, different candle boundaries. A strategy built on
daily candles needs re-testing; do not assume it carries over unchanged.

This is one of the details worth checking before
choosing a broker, alongside the fee schedule
and the licence.

This article is for information only and is not investment advice. Conditions and fee levels are published by the brokers and can change at any time — check with the broker you actually use. Leveraged forex and CFD trading carries a high level of risk and can cost you your entire deposit.