After a little more thought about it, I just realized what the issue is. I've got my base currency set to AUD -- which forces it to download the EURAUD and AUDUSD history in order for MT5 to be able to accurately calculate the profits in AUD. So in order to prevent this from happening I needed to set the base currency to USD or EUR (one of the currencies from the main selected pair) -- with the added upside of it being a little faster to run the backtest due to the fact that it doesn't need to calculate the exchange rates every tick.
Of course this now makes sense to me, silly of me not to have put it together earlier.
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This is something that's been bugging me for awhile and I've tried searching for information but not found anything.
Whenever I initiate a backtest via MT5 Strategy Tester, with my own EA which is set to only work with EURUSD -- it begins immediately downloading the tick history for EURAUD, then AUDUSD and possibly other completely unrelated pairs, of which there is no mention of within the EA code.
This is particularly annoying for me as I'm on a pretty slow internet connection, so it takes quite a bit of time whenever it needs to download a few years worth of tick history. I usually manually download the relevant tick history via the Symbols window -- but MT5 just insists on downloading the same timeframe of history for other random pairs right after initiating the backtest.
Is this a bug? And if so can it be fixed? Or is there some valid reason for this which I'm unaware of?
Cheers.