Trading Trends Today, Read on a South African Clock

The session clock, translated into South Africa Standard Time

South Africa Standard Time is a fixed UTC+2 the whole year round, with no daylight-saving shift. That is a genuine advantage when you read a feed like this one, because your own clock never moves: every change in the windows below comes from the other end of the world. The four sessions land roughly here.

• Sydney: about 00:00 to 09:00 SAST for most of the year, an hour earlier while Australia is on summer time.
• Tokyo: 02:00 to 11:00 SAST all year, since Japan keeps no daylight saving either.
• London: 09:00 to 17:30 SAST through British Summer Time, shifting to 10:00 to 18:30 SAST once the UK clocks go back.
• New York: 15:30 to 22:00 SAST for most of the year, moving to 16:30 to 23:00 SAST across the Southern-Hemisphere summer.
• The London and New York overlap, where most of the volume in the instruments below sits: roughly 15:30 to 17:30 SAST, later 16:30 to 18:30 SAST — the South African late afternoon either way.

Where the servers are, and what that does to the dates on your chart

MetaTrader 4 and MetaTrader 5 run from the Equinix NY4 data centre in New York; cTrader runs from London. For most of the year South Africa sits 6 hours ahead of the MetaTrader servers and 1 hour ahead of the cTrader server, widening to 7 and 2 hours when the Northern clocks fall back. Candles are stamped in server time rather than in SAST, so a daily bar on an IC Markets chart neither opens nor closes at South African midnight, and a story dated today on this page can belong to yesterday's bar. Read the offset out of your own terminal once and write it down.

The window where a headline moves the margin, not just the price

IC Markets publishes Higher Margin Requirement windows in which available leverage is temporarily cut back: from 30 minutes before the daily close until 15 minutes after the open, from an hour before the Friday close until 30 minutes after the Monday open, and from 15 minutes before a high-impact release until one minute after it. The releases that trigger the third window are precisely the ones that generate the stories on this page. A position sized against the headline 1:5000 rather than against the actual band ladder is exactly the position that gets uncomfortable inside it.

Everything below comes off global wires and is quoted in US dollars. Two things about it are local: the clock above, and the currency you keep score in. Ten account base currencies are published and the rand is not one of them, so a dollar move of a given size is a different rand number every day, converted at your bank rather than inside the platform. Market context, not trading advice. CFD trading carries a high risk of losing money.

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