Clarification on the economic calendar times

 

Good morning, I know that there have been many other discussions on the MQL5 Economic Calendar, but I would like to highlight this fact that I cannot understand.

Let me start by saying that I am using IC Markets as a Broker, I know for a fact that the ICM candle times are GMT +2 in standard time and GMT +3 in daylight saving time

Now I pose this example related to NFP news. If I obtain a list of these news with the "CalendarValueHistoryByEvent" function, I notice that the news of November 3, 2023 is at 3.30 pm (daylight saving time), while that of December 8, 2023 (standard time) is at 4.30 pm .

So far everything is perfect... However, when I look at the candles on the chart, for example on EURUSD, I see that the price movement due to the news is in both cases at 3.30pm.

I would just like to know why this is happening? In my opinion also on the graph you should see the movement one at 3.30pm and the other at 4.30pm.

 

This is because every time the broker time zone changes from GMT to DST all historical candles' time are updated. 

For example in the UK the clocks go forward 1 hour at 1am on the last Sunday in March, and back 1 hour at 2am on the last Sunday in October. So if you are looking at historical bars before last Sunday of March (while you are in 28-May now) you have to assume all candles 1 hour backward.

I hope it makes sense to you.

 

First of all, thanks for the very quick response. 

So you mean that when we return to standard time in October, that is, we set the clock back one hour again, all historical bars will be moved forward one hour again?

If so, I take note of it, but, in my humble opinion, it would have been better to always leave the original time of the period.

 
To clarify this you should consider that each central bank news release time is different depending on the country's time zone. In fact it is not about broker time zone only it is also about the country that releases news.
 
There is error on how MT5 terminal calculates dates in Calrndar. 

MT5 automatically adds the current GMT offset of your broker to all calendar dates (which are originally downloaded as GMT times).

NFP should always on the same hour 3:30 pm on ICMarkets, because it follows ney York DST changes.

 
amrali #:
C'è un errore su come il terminale MT5 calcola le date in Calrndar.

MT5 aggiunge automaticamente l'attuale offset GMT del tuo broker a tutte le date del calendario (che vengono originariamente scaricate come orari GMT).

L'NFP dovrebbe essere sempre alla stessa ora alle 15:30 su ICMarkets, perché segue i cambiamenti dell'ora legale di New York.

In fact, I also think there is something wrong with the graphs or the news times in the calendar.

There should ALWAYS be a correspondence between the candles on the chart and the calendar times, which is not the case now.

In fact, at this moment there is no correspondence between the times of the NFP news calendar and the price movement of the relative candle, which I mentioned in the first post.

This is serious, because, for example, it prevents you from creating statistics on price movements in the history of the news.

You can always do it, but you have to know if NY is in winter or summer time and always adjust the calendar times accordingly and all this only for NY, then there is the news from European countries that use a different logic... there is it drives me crazy, everything could have been much simpler in my opinion. ...Thanks for the reply!!

 
The reason is because the terminal has no information about the times when your broker switches to Summer or winter time. MT5 cannot keep track of DST time changes for all brokers. Each forex broker follows a different DST schedule and even some broker do not adopt DST changes on their server times.

So, you should use an external solution to adjust the calendar dates according to the dst rule which is followed by your specific broker.

The developers team adopted a simple solution, just add the current GMT offset of your broker (known at time of calendar request) to all the calendar dates (downloaded from a centeal MetaQuotes server as GMT time), hoping that this may approximate the true past times of ecconomic events.