NOW — clock accessors¶

NOW is a DSL-level reference to the strategy's clock. It returns time-of-day fields (hour, minute, weekday, date) plus the raw epoch-ms timestamp. Use it for session-window gating, time-of-day filters, and relative deadlines on pending orders.

Shape¶

NOW.<field>
NOW                      -- bare form, equivalent to NOW.epoch_ms
NOW + <duration>         -- relative deadline (epoch_ms)

Fields¶

Field	Returns	Range
`NOW.hour_utc`	Integer 0–23	UTC hour
`NOW.minute_utc`	Integer 0–59	UTC minute
`NOW.weekday`	Integer 0–6	ISO weekday, Monday = 0
`NOW.date_utc`	Integer	Days since 1970-01-01 (epoch day)
`NOW.epoch_ms`	Long	Milliseconds since 1970-01-01T00:00:00Z

All values are derived from StrategyContext.clock. In backtest, this is the simulated clock, advancing as candles close. Live deployments read wall-clock UTC time.

Session-window gating¶

RULES
    -- London open and NY open windows on XAUUSD
    WHEN NOW.hour_utc IN [7, 8, 13, 14, 15, 16]
     AND POSITION.gold = 0
    THEN BUY gold SIZING 0.10

IN [...] is the existing membership operator. Combine with POSITION.<stream> = 0 to gate entries to specific session hours.

For sub-hour precision, add NOW.minute_utc:

WHEN NOW.hour_utc = 14
 AND NOW.minute_utc < 5
 AND POSITION.gold = 0
THEN ...

(Strategy fires only on candles whose closing minute is 0, 1, 2, 3, or 4 of hour 14.)

Weekday filters¶

WHEN NOW.weekday < 5      -- Monday through Friday only (Mon=0, Fri=4)
 AND ...
THEN ...

Useful for FX strategies that should skip Saturday/Sunday gaps.

Relative deadlines on pending orders¶

NOW + <duration> evaluates to the epoch-ms timestamp <duration> from now. Pair it with TIF GTD UNTIL to auto-expire pending orders:

BUY gold SIZING 0.10
    ORDER_TYPE = STOP AT gold.close + 50
    TIF GTD UNTIL NOW + 10m

After 10 minutes, if the stop hasn't triggered, the broker auto-cancels the pending order.

Duration suffixes: s (seconds), m (minutes), h (hours), d (days).

Determinism¶

The clock injected into StrategyContext is the engine's clock. In backtest, this is the simulated time that advances with each candle. In paper / live, it's the system clock. Either way, the value of NOW.<field> is determined by the engine's clock — not by System.currentTimeMillis() — so backtests are reproducible.

Common gotchas¶

UTC only. NOW.hour_utc reads UTC. There's no NOW.hour_local or NOW.hour_<broker>. If your strategy reasons about a session in local time (e.g. "8am New York"), translate to UTC at strategy-author time (NY = UTC-4 or UTC-5 depending on DST).
NOW.weekday is ISO, not US convention. Monday = 0, Sunday = 6. (Java's DayOfWeek is 1-indexed; the DSL subtracts 1.)
Fields are integers, not strings. NOW.weekday = 0 works; NOW.weekday = "Mon" does not.
NOW + 10m is in milliseconds, not seconds. The duration literal is canonicalized to ms at parse time.
Backtest determinism only. When qkt run mode samples a different clock-now between rule-evaluation moments (e.g. a slow indicator-compute path), NOW.minute_utc is read at the instant of rule evaluation. Don't assume it's monotonic with respect to your candle close.

What this composes with¶

Actions — OCO_ENTRY and TIF GTD UNTIL pair with NOW + <duration>
Conditions — NOW.<field> is a primary expression usable in any WHEN clause