Many data vendors impose limits on the amount of historical data you can obtain. MetaStock itself can only handle a maximum of 65000 "periods" of data. So if you are looking at hourly data, with a typical 7 hour trading day, and around 250 trading days a year, you are looking at 37 years maximum of data able to be plotted.

MetaStock has its own default of 2000 periods of data whenever you open up a chart. Try clicking File -> Open and under the top Options toolbar, click Load Options. Change this to Load 65000 periods of data.

If you don't get any additional history for a long-traded symbol (eg on US markets try NYSE:GE) then this would appear to be a Reuters limitation in their data feed. You should contact their support department and ask if there is any way that this could be increased.

Please report back here and let us know how you get on.

I'm thinking about getting an MS Pro to be able to backtest some intraday futures strategies. Ideally I'd like to be able to go back at least 7 years to test this. I'm primarily looking at 5-minute bars. If 65,000 periods of data is the limit then would I not be able to do this with any Equis product (6.5 trading hours/day * 20 periods/trading hour = 150 periods/day; 65000 periods / 150 periods/day = 500 days, which is only about two years)?

That is correct.

The MetaStock file format, with its limitation of 65000 bars of data, has remained essentially unchanged since the format was invented by another company, Computrac, in 1987. There have been minor enhancements to the format over the years, but no real extension of the number of bars supported (remember, this was back in the days when intraday data on computers was practically impossible without a big mainframe).

You can either split up your data into different "chunks" or look for alternative software packages to perform your analysis.