A time zone is the offset from universal time that decides what clock reading a moment is written as, and Fincanva writes every date and time in the app in the time zone your browser reports. Nothing is saved on your account: the browser you are signed in on decides, every time a page loads.
Also seen as: local time, browser time
How does Fincanva handle it?
- Rebalance dates, the times your strategies were computed, "as of" dates and the dates along a simulation are written in your browser's zone while you are signed in.
- There is no setting for it: Fincanva stores no time-zone preference and has no control to change one. To change what you see, change the time zone of the device or browser you are reading in.
- A panel embedded in another site is the exception — it is read outside your session, so it falls back to UTC.
- The very first page of a first visit is written in UTC, before your browser has reported its zone (why that first page can show another date).
What does it look like in practice?
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 backtest.
Now run it at 23:30 London time on 12 March. You see 08:30 on 13 March — a different date for the same backtest, and the correct one for where you are. This is the case that made the rule worth stating: before Fincanva followed the browser, that backtest could be labelled with a day nobody reading it had actually been in.
Which time zone are Fincanva's dates shown in?
Yours — the one your browser reports — 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. Near midnight that can put the date a day out: east of Greenwich, just after local midnight, the first page can still show yesterday's date; west of Greenwich, late in the evening, it can already show tomorrow's. That first page does not correct itself — it stays in UTC until you move on — and the next page you load is written in your own zone, as is every page after it.
It is one page on one visit. If a date still looks a day out on a later page, it is not this.
What does the time zone not change?
The moments themselves. A rebalance, a backtest 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 backtest finished — measures a distance between two moments, and a distance is the same in every zone.
Used in 2 pages
- Home, the page you land on after signing in · Getting started
- Rebalance