The short version

Every derived bar type throws something away. Most of them do not tell you what.

Renko, range and Heiken-Ashi charts are all built by transforming real trades into something easier to read. That is a fair trade — until the transformation quietly replaces prices that happened with prices that did not, and your indicators, stops and backtests start computing from fiction. This page shows exactly what each one discards, with the evidence, and what we built instead. It is free.

What each bar type actually hides

Bar type	A new bar when…	What gets thrown away
Renko	price travels a fixed distance from the last brick	The real high and low. Wicks are pinned to the brick boundary, so a six-tick probe against you is erased.
Range	the bar covers a fixed high-to-low distance	Bars that never traded get added. A gap is filled with a staircase of zero-volume bars, and closes are forced onto boundaries.
Reversal	price pulls back a set amount from the bar’s extreme	Nothing inherently — but it is not a Renko, and it is constantly confused with one.
Heiken-Ashi	(same as the underlying bars)	The open and close. Both are averages. On an HA chart your indicators are reading prices that never printed.

The one idea behind all of it

Keep the real prices. Show the smoothing.

Every one of these transformations is worth having — Renko really does make trend structure obvious, Heiken-Ashi really does calm a noisy chart. The problem is never the picture. It is that the picture is achieved by editing the data underneath it, and nothing tells you which numbers survived.

So the rule we built to is simple: the chart can look however you like, but every price on it must be a price that traded, and anything invented must be visible as invented. Where a transformation genuinely needs to change what you see, we do it in the drawing and leave the data alone.

What is in the package

aiTrueWick RenkoFixed-size bricks with real wicks. The adverse excursion inside each brick survives instead of being flattened to the boundary.

aiTrueWick ReversalA new bar only when price actually turns. Bar height means something here — it is how far that leg ran.

aiTrueWick RangeRange bars that never invent a bar. A gap stays a gap, and every close is a price that traded.

Two chart stylesOne marks the unfinished bar so you cannot trade a brick that has not settled. One draws Heiken-Ashi over untouched data.

Get the TrueWick bar types free

Create a free account and download them. That is the whole price — no card, no trial clock. One package: Renko, Reversal, Range, plus two chart styles.

Create a free account & download →

One NinjaTrader install note: newly added add-ons trigger an authorisation prompt the first time NinjaTrader compiles them. You must answer Yes. Answer No and they silently never compile and simply will not appear — with no error telling you why.

Common questions

Which bar type should I start with?

If you have never used one of these, start with Renko for trend structure or Range if you want every bar to represent the same amount of movement. Reversal bars suit you if what you care about is how many times the market changed direction rather than how far it went. Heiken-Ashi is a smoothing layer rather than a bar type in our version — you can put it on top of any of them.

Do these work with my indicators and strategies?

Yes, and that is largely the point. Because the underlying prices are real, an ATR or a stochastic computed on these bars is computed from trades that happened. On a standard Heiken-Ashi chart, by contrast, the same indicator is averaging synthetic values.

Can I backtest on them?

You can, and honest highs and lows remove one large source of distortion — a backtester asking “did price reach my stop inside this bar?” now gets a truthful answer. That does not make Renko backtesting trustworthy on its own. Any backtest is still only as good as your tick data and your fill assumptions. Treat the result as a sketch.

Are they really free?

Yes. Create an account on this site and download them. We ask for the account so the download works and so we can tell you when there is a fix — there is no card, no trial period and no upsell wall inside the product.

Will they slow my charts down?

They should not. Each bar type does no memory allocation while processing ticks and caches the instrument lookup once per series, and the Heiken-Ashi style computes only the visible window rather than the whole history, so a 200,000-bar chart costs about what a 500-bar one does.

The rest of the family

Renko barsFixed-size bricks. What the standard version hides in its wicks.Read it →Reversal barsA new bar only when price actually turns. Not the same as Renko.Read it →Range barsWhy the standard ones invent bars that never traded.Read it →Heiken-AshiSmoothing that quietly replaces your data — and how to keep both.Read it →

What else we make

Enhanced Chart TraderOrder entry on the chart — brackets, breakeven, trailing stops and a real PnL readout without leaving the chart.See how it works →Trade CopierTrade one account, have the rest follow — evaluations, funded accounts and your own, with per-account sizing.See how it works →Key Levels ConfluenceSupport and resistance that agrees with itself — where several methods land on the same price.See the levels →Support & Resistance SuitePrior session levels, opening ranges, session boundaries. Pairs naturally with bar types that respect real levels.Browse the suite →

Also worth a look: all our NinjaTrader indicators · prop firms that work with NinjaTrader.

Provided free by Affordable Indicators, Inc. Nothing here is trading advice. Derived bar types hide time, and the bar currently forming is never final until it completes — understand both before trading from them. Not affiliated with NinjaTrader. All product and company names are the trademarks of their respective owners.

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NinjaTrader Bar Types: Renko, Range, Reversal and Heiken-Ashi