Imported from previous forum
[ original email was from Jim Northey - jnorthey@lasalletech.com ]
This request was originally made by NYMEX. The FIA Standards Working Group - when completing the mapping from TREX to FIX, encountered a need to add timestamps to the trade capture report. These timestamps can periodically change due to regulatory and market practices.
The proposal is to add a TimeStamp block that follows the pattern of the Parties Block. A repeating group of TimeStamps:
NoTimeStamps
->TimeStamp (Required)
->TimeZone (optional - default LocalMktTime)
->TimeStampType (Required)
->TimeStampSource (optional)
This could be added to Order, Exec Report, Trade Capture - much the same way we did for Parties block to provide a flexible mechanism for associating additional times with a transaction.
[ original email was from Ryan Pierce - rpierce@taltrade.com ]
I think the idea of being able to specify a series of timestamps from different sources is a good one.
However, I strongly disagree with the use of local market times. Currently the only representation of time in the FIX spec is UTC, and I believe this is a practice that should continue. UTC is completely unambiguous. There’s no need to worry about timezone, whether or not daylight savings time is in effect, and what to do when a “day” has 23 or 25 hours thanks to daylight savings time transitions, including the confusion when clocks roll back an hour, making previous timestamps appear later than the current time.
My computer has settings for more than 70 distinct time zones. I’m very glad that my FIX implementation only needs to handle UTC and doesn’t need to concern itself with rules regarding other timezones. Just about every OS or runtime environment contains library calls that allow one to convert between local time and UTC based on the local timezone rules.