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MetaTrader 5 gives you several testing modes.
They are easy to select.
Understanding what they actually mean is more important.
Because “Every tick” and “Every tick based on real ticks” sound almost identical — but they are not doing the same job.
The four practical price-testing modes
Open prices only
The tester primarily processes bar openings.
This is extremely fast and can be useful for strategies whose logic genuinely acts only at bar open.
It is a poor choice for systems that care about what happens inside a candle.
1 Minute OHLC
MetaTrader processes the Open, High, Low and Close points of each one-minute bar.
It adds more intrabar information while remaining relatively fast.
Again, however, it is not replaying the original tick stream.
Every tick
MetaTrader generates an intraminute tick sequence from M1 data.
The tester knows the one-minute bar and uses its modelling logic to create intermediate ticks.
This provides detailed event flow, but the resulting sequence is synthetic.
Every tick based on real ticks
The tester uses historical ticks supplied in the symbol's history.
MetaQuotes describes this as the mode closest to real historical market conditions.
No synthetic reconstruction is needed where valid real tick history is available.
One major difference: spread
When MetaTrader uses real ticks, the Bid/Ask relationship can change throughout the minute.
That means historical spread variation can exist inside the simulation.
In generated Every Tick mode, MetaTrader documents that Ask is derived from Bid using the spread associated with the corresponding minute bar.
That can be a major difference for:
- scalpers,
- news-sensitive strategies,
- systems trading around rollover,
- tight stop-loss strategies,
- spread filters.
A strategy can therefore experience the same broad price movement and still produce different trades.
MetaTrader checks real tick history against minute bars
There is another detail many users miss.
MT5 does not simply accept a tick archive blindly.
During real-tick testing, it checks tick history against minute-bar history.
The tester can report mismatches in its journal.
MetaQuotes also documents fallback behaviour when tick and minute history are incomplete or inconsistent.
This matters because a test completing successfully does not automatically mean every historical minute was represented by an uninterrupted stream of original ticks.
The Strategy Tester journal is worth reading.
What “real ticks” does not mean
Real historical ticks do not turn the Strategy Tester into a perfect recording of live trading.
They primarily improve the historical market-data stream.
A backtest still has to model or approximate things such as:
- execution delay,
- slippage,
- commissions,
- order-filling rules,
- liquidity constraints,
- broker-specific trading conditions.
The Strategy Tester can emulate execution delay, which helps, but historical Bid and Ask data alone cannot tell you exactly how a particular live order would have been filled.
100% quality is not the end of due diligence
A quality indicator is useful.
It is not a certificate that the entire testing environment matches your intended broker.
You can have excellent tick coverage while still having:
- the wrong time mapping,
- the wrong trading sessions,
- the wrong contract size,
- the wrong tick size,
- unrealistic commissions,
- different spread behaviour,
- a mismatched symbol configuration.
The more sensitive the strategy is, the more these details matter.
A practical mode-selection rule
Use the simplest mode that preserves the behaviour you are currently studying.
During idea development:
Open prices / M1 OHLC → speed
During serious strategy validation:
Every Tick → richer modelling
For tick-sensitive final historical validation:
Every Tick Based on Real Ticks → preferred
Then verify the environment around those ticks.
Because the most detailed price stream is only useful when the rest of the simulation makes sense.
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