I'm not sure if this is the right forum to post this... pardon me but I'm a new user. I'm using Metastock Pro with subscriptions to real-time data from the major US exchanges

I'm having trouble running a backtest using historical data that is older than about 2008. I can run hourly backtesting with dates from, say Nov 2008 to present.

Specifically, I'm choosing one of the stock strategies (RSI, for example). I select a few stocks and select hourly as the option. I've tried several, C, AA, and a few index ETFs such as IVE with the us; in front. I chan chart these fine, so I know my data feed is running ok. I specify the data range for each stock to be something like 10/1/2001 to 12/31/2001 and start the backtest. I quickly get a view results which then shows that there is no results with the text:

Simulation Date 1/18/2009 5:21:14pm 0 hourly bars 0/0/000 12:00 AM through 0/0/000 12:00 AM (0 days)

and and error: Simulation encountered an invalid security

I picked my securities out of the list of know securities... what went wrong? Everything works fine if I change the interval to daily.

It seems that Metastock is useless to me if I can't backtest historical hourly data...