Date Format

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Imported from previous forum

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A date usually is an identification of a time period, starting at 00:00 and lasting 24 hours. Therefore time zone information is implicitly required, every time a date is given. This may be important for international settlements. A date in Japan is quite distinct from something that appears like the same date quoted in Germany.
The current date format of FIX 4.1 does not allow for any time-zone handling.

The date format should be extended in FIX for the case in which time-zones are required. We would like to attach the contents of the Unix TZ environment variable to the date, producing a format like YYYYMMDD$TZ .

By the way, this problem does not occur for the time format itself. It can always be specified in GMT and calculated back to the real time locally.

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With FIX 4.1, for any field in which the precise time is required, we created a timestamp out of the date + time which is represented in GMT. There was still a need to represent TradeDate for instance as a Date and not a timestamp. Therefore, the Date fields which remain in FIX 4.1 are designed to represent the Date in the local market. For example, I am located in the US Central Timezone but do a trade in Japan at 19:00 my time which is really the next day in Japan. The TradeDate field in the FIX message should represent the date of the trade in the local market (not my timezone or relative to GMT) and in that example should be my "tommorow". Please repost if this is unclear or if you have additional thoughts. If we need to represent a point in time, we should use a Timestamp vs. Date.

> A date usually is an identification of a time period, starting at 00:00 and lasting 24 hours. Therefore time zone information is implicitly required, every time a date is given. This may be important for international settlements. A date in Japan is quite distinct from something that appears like the same date quoted in Germany.
> The current date format of FIX 4.1 does not allow for any time-zone handling.
>
> The date format should be extended in FIX for the case in which time-zones are required. We would like to attach the contents of the Unix TZ environment variable to the date, producing a format like YYYYMMDD$TZ .
>
> By the way, this problem does not occur for the time format itself. It can always be specified in GMT and calculated back to the real time locally.
>