Daily Pivot Shift

Rollover timestamp and Friday market close.

At what time? What does that mean? Can you please provide a more full response. Thank you.

I'm new and had the very same question as you when I was investigating pivots. It would seem that pivots point are subjective to different traders in different places. I'm not aware of which time is most used nor do I think anyone can answer that question accurately. So my common sense told me to just use the first hour the market opens on Monday as hour 0. This option is not producing any stable results from pivots, neither as support/resistance nor breakout. If you find the magic hours please post it here....Ps: 0 hour is 4pm central time my time. Thats 5pm Eastern time, hope that helps. 

Jeremy the specific times for me are irrelevant to you unless you happen to live in my same timezone and are using my same broker.

The point is to determine the "event" of interest and from there work within your boundary conditions (your timezone, your broker's server GMT shifted timestamp) to latch onto the metatrader time - TimeCurrent() - for which this event occurs.

Your broker can tell you when they account for rollover credit/debit and when they close for business on Friday.

Phillip,

Thank you for helping me with this.

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I understand that the amount of "shift" I use will depend on my broker & timezone and will most likey be different than yours. But if I understand this correctly, what I am trying to find out is the time of day to shift to. So it wouldn't matter if we lived on opposite sides of the world we would ideally both shift the pivot times to the optimal close time.

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It sounds like you are suggesting the close time of my particular broker for the close of the Daily Candle. Since brokers close at different times how does that help me find the optimal close time that most traders use around the world? If most traders around the world use the close times relative to their brokers timezone then it would seem to me that #6 in in my first post would be the best. (Use London's close time when trading the London Session and use 4pm or 5pm EST for the close of the candle when trading the US session.

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I just don't understand why you would suggest I base the close of the daily candle relative to the close of business for my broker. Certainly London won't base their Pivots on my broker's close time.

Jeremy I think you misunderstand the reason why one might note rollover time and friday COB (close of business)...I don't mean to say that the rest of world cares when your broker does this but rather that you should, and if warranted you might choose to take action preceding the time of these events.

Closing positions prior to the weekend is one of those "prudent" measures. You aren't attempting to pre-empt a market move that happens at close, but rather you aim to not be exposed to the risk of the unknown that comes with news that develops while the markets are closed on weekend which result in market gaps at open on Monday.

In regards to rollover, which tends to be universally applied at 5pm ET, some people like to develop strategies that hinge on looking at whether gaps or reversals happen at time of rollover because favorable positions (those credited with swap) would tend to be closed after rollover has been credited versus say 5 minutes prior to rollover.

I'm not saying these are first-order effects, well the weekend one tends to be, just saying if you are accumulating a list of times to analyze then these two merit investigation. The specific times you'd have your EA looking for though depend on your broker's server time relative to GMT relative to the timing of the events themselves of course.

Humm... Option #6. Maybe this is what I've been missing. If you use option number 6, wouldn't you also need to add another close time for Asian Session. So then the daily pivots become 8 hours pivots or to put another way, you'll have to change the pivots every 8 hours instead of every 24 hours. This might be the magic way to use pivots, could you message me if that approach works for u.

Phillip,

It is clear now that we are not talking about the same thing. When I say 'Close' I am not talking about closing my orders at a certain time. I am talking about calculating Daily Pivots with the best 'High/Low/Close' times.

Ubzen,

Yeah, I wasn't sure about the Asia session. I am not really sure about any of it actually. I thought someone might know. I guess I will start testing myself. I'll let you know if I find out anything.

To take a guess : US & London sessions are where most of the world's Forex volume traded. With London I've read somewhere being the 'greatest' in forex traded volume. So London close times (option 6) is where I would place my bet. 

But to answer what majority of Close Time most online traders use, I would have to underline the fact that most MT4 Brokers I know set their clock to GMT or GMT +2 (this I also read is due to the fact that it will make weekend gaps better smoothed when averaging). And most will just use Daily pivot as is, i.e. based on broker-time candle close. So that would make it inconclusive (will need to take statistics on different platforms too). Your idea / indicator seems to be worth investigating.