Time Zone Conversion for Day Trading

Aug 2, 2012 JOHN PAUL day trading time zones, emini time zone, futures time zone, marketopen, ninjatrader time zone, ninjatrader utc, trading utc 2 Comments

Ever been in a position where you needed to calculate what your time zone is in another part of the world?  At Day Trade To Win, we do this all the time for our customers.  Some of our software requires minor time zone configuration in your chart.  This is also useful for general communication purposes.  See what works best for you…

Click on the image below to see what we mean…

Using TheTimeZoneConverter.com – http://www.thetimezoneconverter.com/
In the left area of the conversion box, type in the original time.  In most cases, this local time default setting is fine.  On the right, don’t worry about the top time box.  Type in the destination time zone below and the conversion will happen automatically.  For trading purposes, you may need to convert the time into military.  Click the small 24h link on the bottom right of the conversion box and voila!

Using TimeAndDate.com – http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/converter.html
If you want to perform more advanced conversions, this is the place to go.  There are a host of time related applications: a world clock, date to date calculator, stopwatch, and much more.

Using WolframAlpha – http://www.wolframalpha.com
If you’ve never used WolframAlpha, it’s use is much like a search engine, only it can perform advanced mathematical calculations.  Google around for the many uses of WolframAlpha if you’re ever bored.  In our case, simply typing in “time difference between florida and hong kong” presents all the information we need.   WolframAlpha is very good at interpreting what you’re asking.

Manual Calculation
The easiest way to manually calculate the difference in time between two locations is to find both locations’ current UTC time.  As Wikipedia states, UTC (Coordinated Universal Time) is the primary time standard by which the world regulates clocks and time.   Here’s a quick reference: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_time_zones_by_UTC_offset

This requires a bit of investigate work (ie. Google), but once you have the correct values, you can perform mental math resembling the following diagram:
 


Simply count the number of hours between each UTC time zone.
 

Time Zones in NinjaTrader
If for some reason you’d ever want to configure a chart in a time zone other than your own (set by the Windows clock), you can do so using NinjaTrader’s Session Manager:
http://www.ninjatrader.com/support/helpGuides/nt7/index.html?session_manager.htm