UTC-5 is likely NOT your local time zone, since most locales shift for daylight saving. That's a detail many people forget.
You may be starting from timestamps in the form of text. If you use datetime, converting from UTC to local time is as easy as setting the TimeZone property, and datetime automatically accounts for daylight saving changes:
>> d = datetime({'25-Feb-2016 13:20:44' '25-Aug-2016 13:20:44'},'TimeZone','UTC')
d =
25-Feb-2016 13:20:44 25-Aug-2016 13:20:44
>> d.TimeZone = 'America/New_York'
d =
25-Feb-2016 08:20:44 25-Aug-2016 09:20:44
Best Answer