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After suffering for months of having my trade markers be 1-2 bars off, I finally found the cause (thanks to Ninjatrader support who analyzed my log files).
My PC clock runs slow. Very slow.
Windows vista will update the clock once a day, that's not enough for me.
So the solution is this free program which will update your clock every minute if you wish:
I had the same problem, with one of my workstation, and then synchronize it every 2 minutes. And it's very important to be perfectly synchronize, especially if you compare your charts with you trading mates in live, and you don't have the same patterns .
The NTP polling interval is just a key in the Windows registry (for XP, I think it's same thing on Vista and Seven), and you don't see an extra software to do this:
Tip
Start the Registry Editor
Go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE \ SYSTEM \ CurrentControlSet \ Services \ W32Time \ TimeProviders \ NtpClient \
Double-click the SpecialPollInterval value, and change the Base of the Value data to Decimal
change the Value data to the time interval you desire, noting that the time is given in seconds (120 for 2 minutes, 300 for 5 minutes, ...)
That explains why I had a hard time finding a little program to do it, it's obsolete.
or maybe not. Often when updating my time it times out. With the software I found, you can select a time server so i select INRIA which is close to where I live. Should be quicker and more reliable.
So I set windows to do it every 10 minutes as a backup.
Depends on how fast/slow it is. Mine loses 0.022 seconds per minute. That's 31 seconds per day and is enough to make the trade markers off by one bar if you're entering around the bar open or close.
I can't figure out why my pc clock would be off so much. It's not an old machine and it's always on so no battery issues. Not overclocked either.
cunparis i dont think im off that much but i went to google and typed what time is it and i get the official US time clock. right now im off by 5 seconds but i just set it last week around this time,so it is not that bad but its not keeping up
Some timer chipset are better than others, no matter how new is your pc.
I found that machines with variable frequency processors (and using this function) seems to have more issues with this.
In a previous life, in a large financial institution, we were using GPS and radio devices for our NTP servers, like these, but for individual traders, an NTP update every 5-10 minutes, and having a 0.1 second difference with the real atomic time, it's ok, imho.
I was recently writing code for a customer that needed to know the price market time, regardless of the PC clock time.
I found that there is actually a function to do this in Ninja, but it would seem that Zen Fire does not support it. Or I could be completely wrong, as I didn't investigate too deep.
But if you look at the BarTimer code as an example, it actually uses the data feed as the source for the time stamp.
So it seems that it is at least possible for your local PC clock to not matter, being off a few seconds, etc. I really don't know and haven't tried it, I keep my clock synced every few hours because I thought the same thing as you guys, that the bar formation was based on local time. And I still think it is, at least for Zen Fire.