What Is a Renko Chart? Bricks, Sizing and Testing

A Renko chart is built from bricks of a fixed price size: a new brick appears only when price has moved that far, and if price never moves that far, nothing is drawn, no matter how long you wait. Time is left out of the chart entirely, which is what makes the trend look clean and what makes the chart awkward to test a strategy on.

Two platforms give opposite advice on that last point. TradingView's documentation says using Renko bricks to backtest "is not recommended". TradeStation's help says strategies "can be effectively back-tested" on Renko charts, with one condition. A third publisher runs its own multi-year Renko backtest and mentions neither caveat.

ChartLabs has no Renko charts. Our charts are time-based candles plus range bars on NAS100, which build bars from price movement rather than from the clock. That is the closest relative to a Renko brick that we offer.

What is a Renko chart?

Bricks of a fixed price size, drawn only when price covers that distance, with time removed from the horizontal axis.

Wikipedia's article, last edited on 3 December 2025, places the chart type in one line: "Renko charting is similar to point-and-figure in that time does not play a role in Renko charts." Its plotting rules include the one that catches people out: "Partial bricks are not plotted until complete brick size distance is covered by the price." A move that goes most of the way and turns back leaves no mark at all.

TradingView adds two placement rules: "Bricks always have their corners touching" and "There can never be more than one brick in any vertical column."

How does a Renko brick form?

Price has to close past the edge of the last brick by the brick size. TradingView's own worked example, with their round numbers:

"if a brick size is set to two points and the last brick covers prices from $52 to $54, a new brick won't be formed until the price closes at or above $56, or at or below $50. If the price closes between $56 and $58, this new brick will be placed at $56."

TradeStation describes the same mechanism from the reversal side: a brick in the opposite direction needs the market to move against the current trend "by that same minimum amount, the Brick Size, beyond the most recent brick". Wikipedia's version adds that if price covers more than one brick's distance at once, "the respective number of bricks is plotted on the chart".

What brick size should I use?

There is no settled answer, and the publishers do not even agree on how many sizing methods exist.

• TradingView lists three: Average True Range, with a default look-back of 14; Traditional, a fixed user value, where "A common approach is to select a brick size that is about 1/20th of the current value of the instrument"; and Percentage (LTP), a percent of the last trading price, default 1%, of which the same page warns "This calculation approach is subject to repainting."
• TradeStation lists one, a user-set Brick Size, with a constraint the others do not give: it "must be greater than the minimum move, and should be evenly divisible by the minimum move or rounding errors may occur."
• Wikipedia lists one: "A brick size is determined, e.g. 10 points. All bricks are drawn to be of that size."
• TradingSim, dated Sep 9, 2026, says there are two: "There are two primary methods for building each brick: (1) ATR and (2) set price point." Its own FAQ further down names a third, a set percentage, while answering what the best brick size is.
• arxum, last updated September 28, 2026, treats ATR sizing as settled, calling it the most reliable brick size setting and giving 0.5 to 1.0 times the 14-period ATR on the instrument's daily chart, reassessed monthly, with worked ranges of 30 to 60 pips for EUR/USD and $15 to $25 for gold.

Two of those are rules of thumb you could act on today, and they point at different numbers: a twentieth of the instrument's value, or a fraction of its daily ATR. TradingSim's FAQ states the trade-off behind both: "There is no single best size... Smaller bricks mean more signals and more false ones; larger bricks mean fewer signals and later entries."

Whatever you pick, the brick size is part of the strategy, not a display preference. The same rule on a different brick size is a different test.

Does the chart redraw?

Parts of it do, which is why two traders can be looking at different Renko charts of the same market.

Three things from TradingView's documentation. The percentage sizing method "is subject to repainting". Bricks are not final until the chart interval closes: "a 10-minute Renko chart will use 10-minute closes to generate bricks. Only when the 10-minute interval has expired are all produced bricks locked in Renko history." And the projection bricks you see forming inside the current interval are temporary: "Projection bricks only occur on real-time data between chart interval values. This data is lost when the chart is reloaded."

The input matters too, and it differs by platform. TradingView states the precondition and then what it actually uses: "Accurate Renko brick calculation requires tick data. TradingView uses the chart's resolution close value or OHLC value", with a setting to choose "between close and OHLC". TradeStation fixes the interval at one tick, and names the cost: "Renko charts have a fixed interval setting of 1 Tick... Since Renko charts are drawn using one tick, they are limited to a 6 month time frame." Wikipedia describes a third practice: "Renko charts typically only use closing prices based on the chart time frame chosen." TradingSim describes bricks built from the closing price, or optionally from the high and close range for the day.

Same chart name, different inputs, so a brick on one platform is not a brick on another. Write down which one drew yours.

Do Renko charts work?

The costs are named by the people teaching the chart type, and they are consistent about them.

The lag is structural. arxum, a page enthusiastic about Renko, says it outright: "renko always lags. A reversal brick forms only after price has already moved the full brick distance from the prior high or low, so early entries are never part of the renko deal."

TradingSim says the same thing as a classification: the fixed brick size "classifies renko charts as a lagging indicator and in choppy markets can lead to a number of false signals." Its FAQ repeats it: "A brick cannot print until price has already covered the full brick distance, so every renko signal arrives after the move has begun. That lag is the cost of filtering noise, not a flaw you can tune away."

Then the blind spot. arxum again: "renko charts lose context at the edges of sessions. Because time is removed, you cannot see that a news event is approaching."

And the platform limits. TradeStation's help page states one of them in full: "When using a Renko chart, multi-data charts can not be created; only one symbol can be displayed on a Chart Analysis window at a time." The six-month window above is another, and so is the warning that "Dates may not necessarily be evenly spaced across the time axis (x-axis)." TradingSim notes that volume does not come free either, since there is no fixed period to attach a volume bar to.

Can you backtest on a Renko chart?

Read both platform vendors before you trust a Renko test, including your own, because they publish opposite answers.

TradingView's boxed note, in full:

"Renko brick prices are inherently synthetic because of their nature and, therefore, they don't reflect market prices at any precise moment in time, as normal bars do. While Renko bricks may provide a useful interpretation of price activity in discretionary trading, using them to backtest is not recommended. This is because orders there must reflect actual market prices at a specific time. Backtesting orders filled at Renko chart prices will inevitably be inaccurate."

TradeStation's help page, under its own "Strategy Back-testing & Automation" heading:

"Strategies can be effectively back-tested and automated on Renko charts, only when the applied strategy uses "on Close" orders (ex. Buy this bar on Close)."

Those two are reconcilable. TradeStation's exception is an order type that fills at a bar's close, which on a Renko chart is the brick's price, so the result is as synthetic as the brick. TradingView's objection is about the price, not about the software. Both can be followed at once by recording the brick's price and the real fill price as separate columns.

arxum, meanwhile, publishes a three-year EUR/USD Renko backtest and a win-rate comparison between two brick sizes, with neither vendor caveat anywhere on it. We do not reprint win rates, including a third party's, because a win rate detached from the market, the period, the sizing and the costs is not evidence about anything you would trade.

Renko vs the other non-candlestick charts

Range bars are the closest relative: a Renko brick needs the brick distance covered in one direction before it prints, while a range bar closes on a fixed range. Heikin Ashi is a different animal, since the bars are still time-based but their prices are averages, which creates its own version of the synthetic-price problem. Point and figure also drops the clock, and uses two settings rather than one: a box size and a reversal amount. Kagi belongs to the same family, and Wikipedia groups them all with Renko on exactly that basis.

The five publishers give different answers to what builds a brick, so "a Renko chart" names a family of settings rather than one object. Two charts of the same market under that one name can disagree, and the settings are what tell you which chart you are looking at.

How to test a brick rule honestly

Write the rule down first, then record the things that make the test reproducible, because on this chart type most of them are not the rule.

1. One rule, one market, one brick size, one sizing method, fixed for the whole test.
2. Record the brick size and the sizing method beside every result. ATR-sized bricks change size as volatility changes, so "1.0 ATR" is a rule and "30 pips" is a different rule.
3. Record the data source and what the bricks were built from: ticks, closes, or OHLC. The platforms above show how far apart those can be.
4. Step forward one brick at a time so the next brick is not visible while you decide. The lag is the thing you are trying to feel.
5. Take the fill price from a time-based chart of the same market, at the time the brick completed, and log it next to the brick's price. That is TradingView's objection turned into a work-around rather than ignored.
6. Keep the costs in. Spread and slippage apply to the real fill, not to the brick.

Our own charts are time-based candles and range bars, and the range bar case answers TradingView's objection from the other side. TradingView's reason for not testing on Renko is that "orders there must reflect actual market prices at a specific time". Range bars in ChartLabs close on price movement instead of clock time, with entries and exits filled at the exact tick that crossed your level. NAS100 is currently the only symbol with range bars, and the sizes offered come from a per-symbol list rather than a fixed menu. Range bars on an index roll on the instrument's real trading day and follow daylight saving rather than drifting an hour twice a year.

For the method, start with how to backtest a trading strategy. For why the fill price decides whether a result means anything, read backtesting accuracy, slippage and data quality, which makes the general case about prices nobody could have traded at. If you are deciding whether to do this by hand or in code, manual versus automated backtesting covers what each one can tell you.

What to record

Per trade: the date and time taken from a time-based chart, the brick size, the sizing method, the data source, the direction, your entry and exit prices as they could actually have been filled, your stop and the result in R. Then the count.

The date and time matter more here than on a normal chart, because the Renko chart itself cannot tell you when anything happened. TradeStation says so about its own axis: dates "may not necessarily be evenly spaced". A Renko log without timestamps from somewhere else is a log you cannot check.

Next step

If you want to know what a brick rule does on your market, step through it and keep the two prices apart: the brick's and the one you could have been filled at. Start a free trial and replay your market bar by bar on cleaned historical data, sourced from Dukascopy at tick level where it is available.