Zero trades in the Strategy Tester: two cases where the journal had the answer

Two EAs I was asked to test, three days apart at the end of August and the start of September, finished their runs in the MetaTrader 5 Strategy Tester with no trades at all. Neither time was it the settings. The journal had the answer.

The first loaded, drew its panel, and one hour of test time later printed these lines:

2026.07.28 01:00:00   ExpertRemove() function called
2026.07.28 01:00:00   Expert Advisor self terminated
removed itself on 0% of testing interval

I ran it thirteen ways: visual mode on and off, H1 and M1, two date windows, every tick model, two symbols, the owner's own set file. Same line at the same hour every time. On a live chart with ticks coming in it stayed on for 106 minutes. A compiled file doesn't show its reasons, so the report stated exactly what it does and when.

The second trades one symbol but reads 29 of them for a range scanner. One of the 29 with no tick data for the period was enough for the pass to come back with zero bars and zero ticks. It looked like a finished run until the journal was read.

That's why every EA I test gets a one-day run on any symbol first, and the journal is read before a single number. On the first one it took 0.6 seconds.