Understanding Time Zone settings

General Discussions
1

Hey everyone,

I am trying to understand how the time zones work specifically within Ninja Trader 8. I am currently residing within Europe meaning that my current time zone is aligning with Brussels. Based off the documentation I am understanding that setting the time zone setting under the settings option would only affect the times displayed on the chart and have no further impact on trading times.

However, when running back tests I can now see that certain trades are not being taken compared to when the time zones have been set for Chicago. The trade templates have not changed and as I understand it, would not be impacted by changing the time zone as that’s only supposed to be impacting the hours displayed on the chart itself.

I have looked through the legacy forums multiple times trying to understand this and I have resided to changing my system time to Chicago in the past just for the sake of getting correct back tests, however I recently bought a new computer and I find myself reluctant to have to adapt my whole environment just to be able to see the correct trades.

So with this thread I’m trying to understand exactly how everything works under the hood. Given how frequently this topic comes up I know I am not the only person having issues with this and I am looking for clarity. I’d like to get a couple of examples as well to clarify, I can provide screenshots on my end as well if needed.

Before its asked, my process was as follows:

  1. Change time zone in NT
  2. Close NT
  3. Clear cache
  4. Restart NT
2

I’m in Europe and Changed the setting in NInjaTrader to EST.

Now everything in NinjaTrader, charts, backtesting…everything is in EST.

If I submit an Order to trigger at 09:30 via a strategy, it will trigger at 09:30 EST. (15:30 European time).

1 Like
3

It is common to write an Auto Broker Time Adjust function in other platforms to accommodate different Broker times, so that optimized code does not break when changing time zones. You might consider including that function if your code trades specific time windows, you travel, or you are selling your code.