What Is a Renko Chart? How a Brick Gets Built

A renko chart prints a brick each time price travels a set distance and prints nothing at all while price stays inside that distance. Sierra Chart's documentation specifies the brick in price ticks and measures it from the brick's open to its close; Quantower describes its renko as time-independent, built on price movement only, with a new brick appearing once price clears the previous brick's body by the size the trader has set.

That makes the horizontal axis of a renko chart something other than a clock. Minutes can pass with no new brick while price holds inside the brick size, and a fast move can print several in a row. The bricks still carry timestamps, and Sierra Chart's renko bar types work only with intraday chart data — its renko page covers version 1647 onwards.

What is a renko chart, and what is a brick?

A renko chart is a price chart whose unit is the brick: a bar whose open-to-close distance is always the same number of ticks. Price has to cover that distance before anything new appears, which is why the chart moves in steps, and why its spacing carries no information about how long a move took.

Sierra Chart documents three renko bar types — standard renko, Flex Renko, and Flex Renko Inverse Setting Bars — alongside an aligned variant, and its keyboard shortcuts for the chart period name them individually: rk for a renko bar, ar for aligned renko, fr for Flex Renko, fri for the inverse-setting form. Quantower documents renko as one of its chart types, with the brick size a parameter the trader sets.

The family resemblance across platforms is the step construction. Everything else — how far price must reverse, where a new brick opens, whether the drawing includes the true high and low — is a setting, and the settings are where two charts that both say "renko" stop agreeing. The same is true of the other chart types that drop the clock: tick and volume bars count trades and contracts instead of ticks of price, and Sierra Chart's period list carries both families plus reversal bars, delta volume bars, price-change bars and point and figure.

How is a renko brick built?

A brick is complete when the difference between its open and its close equals the bar size, and the bar size is given in ticks. Sierra Chart's worked example: a symbol whose tick size is .25 with a bar size of 4 ticks gives a body one full point long. A tick here is the chart's tick-size setting, so the same "4" means different money on different contracts — see tick size against tick value for why those two are separate numbers.

Continuing the trend and turning it around need different amounts of movement. Sierra Chart documents a continuation brick as one bar size of movement in the same direction, measured from the close of the most recent completed brick, and a reversal as twice the bar size in the opposite direction. Where the current brick is still forming, the reversal is measured against the previous brick's close; where it is already complete, against its own close. Quantower's worked example uses a brick size of 10: another 10 in the same direction adds a brick, and 20 against it starts one the other way.

Where the new brick opens follows from that. On a continuation, the new brick's open equals the previous brick's close. On a reversal, the new brick's open equals the previous brick's open — which is what makes the reversal cost two bricks' worth of price. On a contract whose tick is 0.25, a 4-tick brick is one full point and the turn takes two.

Does a renko brick show the real high and low?

The brick body does not. Sierra Chart is explicit that the bar size applies to the body and excludes the high-to-low range, and it keeps six values for every renko bar: a renko open and renko close, which are the two prices that draw the body, plus the four true values from the underlying data: open, high, low and close. All six appear in its Chart Values Window, and the true close will not necessarily match the visible renko close once a brick is complete.

The true extremes reach the chart as wicks. Sierra Chart's renko bars are candlesticks that track the high and low outside the brick, and its default drawing mode shows them; two of its other drawing options display the body alone and leave the high and low off the chart entirely. Quantower has a show-wicks option that marks the real high and low reached inside a brick, and two calculation styles that change what the construction reads in the first place: classic, which uses the closing or last price only, and a high/low style which uses the high and low prices, taking highs first and then lows after an up brick.

The step pattern is a drawing convention applied to the prices, and a brick that looks like a clean one-point advance can have a true low below its own open — kept as one of the six values, and drawn as a wick where the drawing mode shows wicks. Reading risk off the body alone understates how far price travelled while the brick was forming.

Does the last brick on a renko chart repaint?

The last brick is provisional, and the platform documentation says so plainly. Sierra Chart describes the final bar on a renko chart as a standard candlestick carrying the true open, high, low and last of the trades that built it, and states that the renko open and close cannot be known until the bar closes and another bar exists after it. That bar is never deleted, though its open value can change when it closes.

Two further cases change the last brick after you have looked at it. With the aligned renko type, at the start of a chart or of a new trading day, the renko open and close can read zero until the alignment price turns up in the data. And where the platform's intraday data storage is coarser than one tick — Sierra Chart's example is a one-minute storage unit — the splitting that holds a brick to its size has to wait for the record to finish, so the forming bar can exceed the price range you specified until then; when the record completes, the last bar is adjusted and a new one added.

Quantower approaches the same question with a build-current-bar option, which draws the brick as it forms. Its documentation notes that with a one-minute time aggregation behind the chart, the bricks that the price movement would have produced are plotted together once the minute is up.

Renko vs range bars: what is the difference?

Both constructions ignore the clock and measure price, and they measure different distances. Quantower's range bars follow three rules: each bar's high-to-low range equals the specified range, each new bar opens outside the previous bar's high-low range, and each bar closes at its high or at its low. A renko brick's size, by contrast, is the open-to-close distance, and the high and low are allowed to sit outside it.

Quantower draws the consequence for its range bars: an instrument too quiet to cover the configured distance adds nothing to the chart, and a more volatile one fills it with more bars. Sierra Chart's period list keeps six separate range variants, so "range bar" is a family too.

What settings change the way a renko chart looks?

Flex Renko is the clearest example: Sierra Chart exposes the construction as three numbers in one box — bar size, trend offset and reversal offset, all in ticks. A standard renko of N ticks is N-0-0. Raising the trend offset moves a new trend brick's open inside the prior brick, so price covers less distance before a brick appears. Raising the reversal offset moves a reversal brick's open away from the prior brick's open, overlapping it, so a turn needs less movement. Both offsets must sit below the bar size. Sierra Chart names 4-2-2 a hybrid renko, and 10-9-1 a trend channel.

Its inverse-setting form, documented from version 1645, takes a bar size, a trend bar offset of at least one tick, and a reversal bar trigger of at least two. Setting the offset equal to the bar size and the trigger to twice it reproduces standard renko: with a bar size of 8, a trigger of 16.

Quantower reaches its variants through extension and inversion percentages. At 50% both, its documentation calls the result a medium renko, with the open in the middle of the brick; at 12.5% both, a geometric renko whose up bricks sit at 45 degrees; at 12% extension with 100% inversion, a turbo renko needing a full brick of reverse movement.

Sierra Chart's new-bar mode is a pair of sub-settings governing when a trend brick and a reversal brick start. One trend option assigns the volume of the trade that meets the bar size to the new brick instead of the one it completed. Another mode lets the forming brick change direction at any moment, under which the usual reversal logic never runs. And Sierra Chart calls one reversal method — reversal amount plus one tick, referenced to the prior close — questionable in its own documentation, supported to match another program, and says reversals are sometimes missed under it. Two charts labelled 10-tick renko can be two different objects.

Why do two renko charts of the same contract disagree?

Usually the data underneath them. Sierra Chart's help topic 47 says the historical intraday data and the data quality from a service affect the accuracy of its non-time bar types, renko among them. The default intraday data storage unit is one second; one tick gives the greatest accuracy, and full accuracy also needs tick-by-tick historical records. Help topic 43 lists renko among seven bar types where historical records coarser than a second, combined with a storage unit other than one tick, can make the bars look slightly different, and says incomplete data from the feed causes differences in renko bars too.

Renko then adds artefacts of its own, all documented:

• Splitting. Where the data records are coarser than a tick, or price gaps, excess range in the brick's own direction is split off. Sierra Chart's example: with a bar size of 5 and a tick size of 1, a complete brick opening at 95 and closing at 100 whose high reached 105 has the 100-to-105 range split into a new adjacent brick, repeating until no excess remains.
• Overlapping bricks. Forcing a new bar at the start of each session cuts the session's last brick short of its specified number of ticks, and Sierra Chart documents the result as bricks that can intersect each other at the session boundary. It says the incomplete bar cannot be completed without fabricating prices, and recommends keeping the session-start setting on anyway so that bricks always begin at a consistent point.
• Gap filling. Price gaps are left unfilled by default, except where reversals occur; the fill options cover every gap or only the session's first. Where the new session opens outside the previous brick's range and a fill option is on, the bricks that fill that gap carry the same timestamp as the new brick.
• Chart and study settings. Topic 47 asks for the Heikin-Ashi study to be taken off the chart before bars of these types are trusted, and for the bar-period and session-times settings to match the chart you are comparing against.

What does a renko chart change on a simulated funded account?

Nothing. The drawdown rule is written in dollars and in daily closes: the line is a fixed distance under the highest balance you have ever ended a day on, it only rises when a day ends higher than any day before it, and it is watched live, so touching it mid-session liquidates the account there and then. None of that reads your chart.

What a renko chart changes is what you can see about the risk. Because the body is the open-to-close distance and the true high and low are kept separately, the move against you inside a brick can be bigger than the brick. A stop placed "one brick away" is still a distance in ticks, and its cost is ticks times tick value times contracts — the same arithmetic as sizing a position against a fixed loss limit. On a contract with a $1.25 tick value, listed per contract on our instruments page, a ten-tick brick is $12.50 of exposure per contract and a reversal is twenty ticks.

The settings decide what the chart shows, so the manual for the platform you actually trade is the one worth reading.

FAQ

What brick size should I use on a renko chart?

Both platforms treat it as a setting the trader picks: Sierra Chart takes a number of ticks and multiplies it by the chart's tick-size setting, Quantower a size in the chart parameters. What the documentation pins down is the consequence. A reversal needs twice that distance before a brick appears the other way, and Sierra Chart asks for the chart's price display format to carry the decimals the tick size needs — .01 where the tick size is .25 — because building renko bars leans on that setting whenever it compares two values.

Why is my renko brick bigger than the brick size I set?

Sierra Chart attributes that to data granularity. When the intraday data storage unit is coarser than one tick — its example is one minute — the splitting that trims a brick to its specified size cannot run until the current data record is complete, so the forming bar can exceed the price range you configured. Once the record completes, the last bar is adjusted and a new one added. Its remedy is a one-tick storage unit with tick-by-tick historical records.

Can you see volume on a renko chart?

Yes, through a volume-at-price study. Sierra Chart's Numbers Bars study replaces the renko bars, keeping the same bar count and timestamps, and displays each one's true open, high, low and close. Its documentation recommends pairing that study with a new-bar mode that starts a bar when the open is crossed, so the reversal bar holds volume-at-price data for every level it covers. Sierra Chart's page for the study notes that elsewhere the same display goes under the name footprint, which we cover in what a footprint chart shows.

Do renko bricks have timestamps?

They do. Sierra Chart's renko types work only with intraday chart data; its documentation gives the bricks that fill a session-opening gap the same date and time as the new brick, and says replacing renko bars with its Numbers Bars study leaves the bar count and the timestamps unchanged. What the chart's spacing does not tell you is duration: Quantower describes renko as time-independent and built on price movement only, so two bricks seconds apart and two bricks hours apart sit side by side the same way.