Time zone

Also seen as: local time, browser time

Which time zone are Fincanva's dates shown in?

Yours — the one your browser reports. Rebalance dates, run timestamps, "as of" dates and the dates along a simulation are all written in that zone while you are signed in, so a moment recorded late in the evening is shown on the evening you experienced it rather than on the day it fell on somewhere else.

Because the browser decides, the same account read from two machines in two zones shows the same moment as two different local readings. Neither is wrong: they are one instant written on two clocks.

Why did a date look wrong for a moment when I first arrived?

Because the very first page loaded on a first visit is written in UTC, before your browser has had a chance to report its own zone. If you are east of Greenwich and reading late in the evening, that first load can show yesterday's date; the page settles onto your own zone immediately after, and every page from then on is already correct.

It is one load on one visit. If a date still looks a day out after the page has settled, it is not this.

Can I change the time zone Fincanva shows dates in?

There is no setting for it. Fincanva has no time-zone preference to store and no control to change one — it follows whatever your browser reports, so the way to change what you see is to change the time zone of the device or browser you are reading in.

What does the time zone not change?

The moments themselves. A rebalance, a run and a simulation date are the same instants whatever zone you read them in — only how they are written down moves. Nothing Fincanva computes depends on your zone, so two people in two countries reading the same strategy see identical numbers and identical results, written against their own clocks.

Relative wordings are unaffected too. A countdown or an age — how many days until the next rebalance, how long ago a run finished — measures a distance between two moments, and a distance is the same in every zone.

Worked example

You are in Tokyo (UTC+9) and a backtest finishes at 08:00 on 12 March, London time. Fincanva shows it to you as 17:00 on 12 March, because that is the same instant on your clock. A colleague in New York (UTC−4) opens the same strategy and sees 04:00 on 12 March. The three of you are looking at one run.

Now run it at 23:30 London time on 12 March. You see 08:30 on 13 March — a different date for the same run, and the correct one for where you are. This is the case that made the rule worth stating: before Fincanva followed the browser, that run could be labelled with a day nobody reading it had actually been in.