What the file actually contains
A MetaTrader export writes times like:
2026.05.04 09:47:06
That is all. No offset, no Z, no timezone name. The same format for a broker in London, one in Cyprus and one in Auckland.
So every tool that reads it must assume a timezone. Ours treats these timestamps as UTC, because most MetaTrader servers run on GMT — an assumption that is right for many brokers and wrong for plenty of others, and the honest way to describe it is exactly that.
What brokers actually use
There is no standard, and the choice is usually deliberate:
- GMT / UTC — the cleanest, and common among brokers serving a global audience.
- GMT+2 or GMT+3 — very widespread. The reason is that it puts the daily candle close at 17:00 New York, which makes the daily chart show five candles a week instead of six with a stub.
- The broker's local time — less common, and the most confusing, because it moves with that country's daylight saving rather than with the market's.
The practical consequence: two traders using different brokers can take the identical trade at the identical moment and see two different timestamps, hours apart.
Why it matters more than it sounds
Analysis by hour of day breaks first. "I trade worst between 14:00 and 16:00" is a real finding on a real dataset — but if your broker runs GMT+3 and you read it as your local time, you are looking at a different three-hour window than the one you actually traded.
Session labels break with it. "London open" is 08:00 London time. On a GMT+3 server in summer that is 10:00 in the file. Any tool assigning trades to sessions by raw hour will label them wrong.
Day boundaries move. A trade closed at 23:30 server time may belong to the next day in your time, or the previous one. Everything grouped by day — daily P&L, trade counts per day, daily loss limits — shifts with it. Our own overtrading analyzer groups by the date a position closed in your browser's timezone, and says so on the page for this reason.
Prop firm daily resets are a third clock. The firm's daily reset is set by the firm, not by your broker and not by you. Three different day boundaries can apply to the same trade.
How to find your offset
In the platform. Market Watch shows the server time; some builds show it in the terminal footer or in account details. Compare it to your own clock. The difference is your offset — write it down.
From a known event. If you traded a scheduled news release, find that trade in your file. You know when the release happened in your own time; the difference is the offset.
From the daily candle. If the daily candle closes at 00:00 server time and you know your broker aligns it to the New York close, the offset follows.
What to do with it
Not much, and that is the point — you do not need to convert anything. You need to know the number so that any hour-based conclusion can be translated.
Write it in your trading plan next to your instruments. It costs one line and it makes every by-hour statistic you ever read mean something specific.
One caveat about daylight saving
Brokers on GMT+2/+3 typically follow a DST schedule, so the offset is not constant year-round — it shifts, usually with European or US changes, and not always on the same weekend as your own.
Which means a year of history can contain two different offsets, and any analysis spanning the change is mixing them. For most questions this is noise. For "which hour is my worst", on a sample gathered across a DST boundary, it is a real source of blur — and one no exported file gives you the information to correct.