Why isn't MT4 smart enough to allow me to set when D1 candles form

It just seems stupid. I want my candles to form off the London open. Is that so hard to ask? It's only the most liquid session of the market.

This might do the trick:
Put the indicator on the H1 chart. In the inputs, chose PeriodMultiplier to be 24, and TimeShift to the hourly start of the day that you want (7, 8 or whatever hour LO is for your broker). Don't delete this chart. Go to File->Open Offline and look for GBPUSD M1441.

Yea, but would my EA's be able to work off of that?

I'm not sure, it depends on how the code is written I suppose.

It places triggers off the open of a new candle.

you could just have it place orders at a certain time in the day, like LO, instead of having it to put orders at candle open

Not even for the sake of placing trades though. I want to do research on daily ranges and I can't because the export data function runs off the candles; which are formed at random times.

but can't u still use H1 candles and have them grouped in 24 from say 8am to 7am or whatever is suitable, export the high and low of that period which will give the daily range

Very true. Although this is all still besides the point. Why does it take such a workaround on an advanced platform like MT4 to just tell it that I want my daily candle to form at some specific hour? It seems ridiculous and I almost feel like its some way for the brokers to make it harder for us to analyze charts.

I still believe GFT has the best charting in the business. I could adjust the candles to do whatever I wanted them to do easily. Unfortunately they're a bucket shop that doesn't use MT4 with EA's.

Nothing stops you to make your own internal representation of the bar in your EA... you'll just have to recode the indicator you use thought....

To understand (and appreciate) why this is like this you need to understand how the chart data is transmitted and archived...

M1 - Imagine there are no bars at all, and you are watching the very first bar ever to exist starting to form on your chart. What is happening exactly to create this? When you first opened your chart to M1 your MT4 said to your brokers server "hey server i'm looking at M1 data, so let's only talk about that. Thanks buddy!". Your broker receives a price change then transmits a message to your MT4 saying "candle of x date and y time has a current open value of $$$, high value of $$$, low value of $$$, and so far the close is currently sitting at $$$". Then each time the price changes your broker REPEATS this message with the new information. With each incoming tick your mt4 updates the rightmost candle to reflect the latest info it has and draws the candle as such.

one minute goes by...

(remember we are looking at a one minute chart) your mt4's rightmost candle is date and time stamped as for one minute ago, but now the server is sending the same message above but for a NEW time. your mt4 realises that it needs to forget about the candle it was on, move all the candles one space to the left, and start drawing a new rightmost candle for this new minute of data.

as each minute goes by and the server updates the time (and possibly date if it's clock hits midnight) your mt4 knows to shuffle the candles to the left and start drawing a new one.

What's important to note is that your mt4 does NOT keep a history of tick data. in the market info pane it will display a line graph for you for a certain amount of ticks but that's all you get. I think it stores the current candles tick data and just draws that... but apart from the current candle mt4 no longer has a need, or WANT, to store each individual price change. It's a waste of memory as far as it's concerned.

So what have we learned so far... mt4 receives information about the state of the current candle from the broker for each price change, but mt4 does not store the tick data and simply updates the current candle. mt4 stores the state of previous candles (but not each tick data that created that candle).

What happens when you don't run mt4 constantly, or your isp spazzes and your platform doesn't receive any data for awhile (or your OS is being a dog and hangs for a bit)? well then you will miss a HEAP of candle data. so what happens if / when you restart mt4? mt4 says to the server "hey server, the last candle i knew about was for date x and time y ! So, what have i missed while i've been gone? Oh by the way, my charts only display ### number of candles, so if i've missed more than that number then just give me the most recent candles and forget about the old ones i've missed that wouldn't be displayed anyway". So the server responds "hey mt4, to get you up to date and fill your chart here are the recent candles you don't currently have". From there the server sends the date and time and OHLC of each candle for the most-recent history so that your mt4 can store that data and display it for you. Now your mt4 is displaying for you the most recent price action.

So what happens when you change from M1 charts to something 'higher'? Well mt4 DOES NOT!!! NOT!!! NOT!!! build the higher candles using information it may (or may not) have from M1 data. If you never even looked at an M1 chart your mt4 doesn't even have any M1 data. None. At all! What happens is your mt4 keeps a separate history for the different timeframes it has looked at, so when you change your timeframes around mt4 has to have the same conversations as above, except instead of asking for M1 candle data it asks for whichever timeframe you are looking at. If you only ever looked at H1 timeframes your mt4 would only ever 'discuss' candle information for H1 candles.

Now let's rewind and think about all this for a moment! IF mt4 stored tick data it would be possible to create ANY timeframe. It could create a 1.2394 minute candle from the tick data it had, or it could create a 3 year candle from tick data. The problem is that people who only look at one timeframe only need the candles for that timeframe, so if you only looked at a weekly timeframe it's EXTREME overkill to have to send to your mt4 each and every tick that occurs within a week just to form ONE SINGLE CANDLE. that would potentially be HUGE loads of data just to create one candle for you, as opposed to what mt4 actually does which is simply request the date and time and OHLC for each candle it needs to know about.

!!! That last paragraph combined with the next paragraph is your answer !!!

Since all the data your mt4 receives comes from a particular server, that server decides what the time is where it resides and therefore what the time is for each tick and therefore for each candle!

So, when YOU open up YOUR mt4 and look at YOUR daily candles you now know the conversation that occurs between YOUR mt4 and the server regarding DAILY candles that your mt4 needs to be updated about. Since YOUR server does not have it's midnight matching with the beginning of London's trading day YOUR mt4 doesn't receive the daily candle info time-aligned as you want it to be. The start of YOUR daily candle occurs when your brokers server hits midnight, and that's that!

This then comes to possible workarounds which you previously felt were silly or seemed unnecessary since mt4 really IS quite a powerful program (a change of candle start time doesn't seem that difficult, until you understand a bit more about how mt4 stores it's data). As long as your servers time clocks-over to a new hour at roughly the same time as London clocks over to a new hour (e.g. server time is 4am, London time is 9pm... instead of server time 4.43am, London time 9pm) then you can create an indicator that builds daily candles for you based on data from hourly candles or even candles from lower timeframes that your mt4 has received.

It is my understanding that the upcoming MT5 (note the FIVE instead of four) will do-away with separate history databases for differing timeframes, and instead will only store (and receive information from the server for) minute candles... from there it will re-create the higher timeframes from this. That means someone who is missing data for a weekly chart, for example, will have to download a metric butt-load of M1 data to get up to date and then be able to calculate from that the missing W1 data it wants to display. This IS EXACTLY the same process as described for your workaround to the issue you are currently having with time-aligning your data, so it's really VERY likely (and so simple) that with MT5 you will be able to specify to the minute when you want YOUR charts midnight to start.

This simplified database has the clear disadvantage that people who don't use M1 data have no choice but to receive M1 data anyway... more data... more more data as i illustrated in the previous paragraph (metric BUTT-LOAD). The benefit however, is that there is now only one history database for your mt5 to have to store, and there is NO possibility of having different timeframes showing conflicting information which was possible and i believe has happened in mt4. e.g. m1 data for midnight shows the candle opening at $1, but when you look at the same open except in let's say H1 the candle data now shows the open is at $1.25... this is because the different timeframes are stored separately on the server just as they are received and stored in separate histories for each differing timeframe in your mt4, so the database for H1 somehow was screwy when you compare it to the M1 data (maybe the cleaner tripped and kicked the server just as it was writing to disk the open value in the H1 database, or a solar flare bounced magic fairy dust off the moon, and so on... computers do odd things, y'know?).

That's basically all there is to know I think. Hopefully I made sense and you can picture in your head what's happening and why it's not so simple to do what would SEEM to be simple, but isn't.

Please note that the actual interaction between mt4 and servers is probably completely different to the very basic description i gave, but my description gives you a rough idea of what's probably going on. Also, any CAPS WORDS are not yelling... they are just emphasised and you should not fall asleep on them.

Time to sleep. Cheers!

You make it sound like this kind of computation is difficult for a computer.

nope.

it's easy. MT4 could have been designed exactly how you want it, and my understanding is MT5 is actually this way (sends minute data only)... but the way MT4 was designed was to transmit and store only what's necessary for the sake of efficiency and simplicity. It could very well be designed to transmit to you every past tick in history, for example, but that would be a blowout and waste of data transmission and data storage.

With tick data it would be possible for MT4 to show you any timeframe you wanted to view, basing a day starting at whatever time you wanted it to, but think about this for a moment... what good is a weeks worth of TICK data to someone who only looks at weekly charts? None. Let's say that every minute there are exactly and only 10 ticks... by my math that works out to be 86,400 ticks in just one week if you count a week as 6 days. That's 86,400 lots of datetime + price data that needs to be transmitted, yet on the weekly chart all you end up with is an Open / High / Low / Close candle, and yet to display this all that is required is a 1 datetime and OHLC piece of data to be sent.

let's assume each datetime, open, high, low, close piece of data is 4 bytes each (which i think they actually are), then it goes as follows...

sending a weeks worth of tick data at ONLY 10 ticks a minute
86,400 ticks * (datetime, price)
= 86,400 * ( 4 bytes + 4 bytes )
= 86,400 * 8 bytes
= 691,200 bytes

compared to simply sending one candle...

1 candle * (datetime, open, high, low, close)
= 1 * (4 bytes + 4 bytes + 4 bytes + 4 bytes + 4 bytes)
= 20 bytes

691,200 bytes versus only 20 bytes, and in the end they display the exact same data. Sure, with the 691,200 bytes of tick data you could represent the data literally any way you want, but it's just overkill. Most people just want their simple candles and be done with it, especially since there's nothing stopping someone opening a lower timeframe chart to get more details.

it's simply monstrously more efficient and logical for the MT4 server to calculate and store a separate and simple database for each of the different timeframes that MT4 clients chart, and then only send the necessary data to each client as they request it. therefore, after every minute of tick data the server calculates and stores a 1min candle of datetime/open/high/low/close, and every 5 minutes it looks at the previous 5 minutes of 1min candles and computes and files a 5minute candle in a 5minute database, and so on as you go up each timeframe. Any time that a client then asks the server for data for whatever timeframe they need the server will then send only the candle data for that timeframe.

so to come full-circle to what you said... it's not difficult to do what you want, and in fact if you wanted to you could code your own custom indicator and build your own charts that start at a different time based off the data you receive in a 1min chart for example... what IS difficult is for the MT4 server and client to be set up such that it is both data efficient AND personally customizable the way you want it.

Now let's twist this slightly. What about if you could request candle data as MT4 currently does, but with the variation in that you can tell the server what time to base the start of the candle. So now instead of having to send your client mountains of data and have your MT4 client build from that the data the way you want it displayed, now the server has to calculate specifically for your client the each candle to send you based on the time you specified as the start time (exactly like the custom indicator suggestion). In this scenario the server either has to have a separate database for each timeframe as it currently does PLUS databases recalced for each possible time offset that could be requested, or each time a client requests candle data with the starting time different to how it is currently stored at the server database then it has to specifically recalculate each requested candle for that client and send that off... for every...single...candle...it ever...requests.

Most anything is possible, but it boils down to designing a system that works and is efficient and simple.