Trading sessions are anchored to local business hours in London, New York, Tokyo and Sydney, but a platform shows one server time. Because the northern and southern hemispheres change their clocks on different dates — and some financial centres do not change at all — the gaps between sessions stretch and compress for a few weeks each spring and autumn.
What moves with the clock: the hour a session's liquidity arrives, the rollover time at which swaps are applied, the expiry stamped on pending orders, and the local time of scheduled data releases. Nothing about the market itself changes; the timestamps do. The reliable habit is to work in the broker's server time for anything mechanical — rollover, expiries, session filters in an automated strategy — and convert to local time only for reading.
Daylight Saving Shift
Clock changes land on different dates worldwide, shifting session hours, rollover and order expiries against your local time.
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