Server Time Zone

Server time is the clock a trading server stamps on candles, orders and the daily rollover, and it is almost never your local time. Most MetaTrader servers run at GMT+2 in winter and GMT+3 in summer, which lands the daily close on the 17:00 New York rollover and produces a clean five daily candles a week instead of a ragged six. The consequences are quiet and structural. A daily open, a previous-day high and any session-based indicator all shift with the server offset, so the same strategy reads different levels at two brokers whose servers differ by an hour. Swap is charged at the server's midnight, not yours. Every time-based rule — a session filter, a news blackout, a time stop — has to be written against server time, and the offset is worth re-checking after each daylight-saving change.