Renko charts strip out time and show you nothing but movement. They also, in almost every platform, throw away where price actually went.
What Renko bars are, what they are genuinely good at, the specific way standard Renko misleads, and what we changed in aiTrueWick Renko.
What a Renko bar is
A candlestick chart prints a bar every fixed slice of time, so a quiet lunch hour produces as many bars as a violent open. A Renko chart ignores time completely and prints a brick only when price moves a set distance. Sideways for forty minutes and nothing is drawn; a fast run stacks bricks quickly.
Trends become clean staircases and chop mostly disappears. That is the appeal, and it is real.
The problem: most Renko bricks have fake highs and lows
This is why NinjaTrader itself warns against backtesting on Renko.
When a brick completes, its high and low are set to the brick’s own boundaries. If price spiked six ticks against you mid-brick and recovered, the finished brick does not show it. That excursion is gone.
The true excursion is tracked while the brick forms and survives as a real wick. A failed probe against the trend stays visible, because it happened.
What we changed
Honest highs and lows
The real excursion is kept and drawn as a wick. This is the whole difference — the chart stops hiding what went against you.
Separate brick and reversal distance
Continuing can cost 4 ticks while flipping costs 8. Cheap continuations, expensive reversals, which removes much of the flip-flopping that makes small-brick Renko unusable.
It sizes itself
Leave Brick Size at 1 and it measures the instrument and picks a size. A brick that suits NQ is wrong on CL, and a fixed default is the most common reason people try Renko once and never return. To be precise: it measures the first 90 minutes of market data and picks a brick that would have produced roughly eight across that range — about forty a session. That is a warmup heuristic, not a true ATR — a bar type receives raw ticks with no bar history to average at startup, so we would rather say what it does than give it a fancier name. It deliberately measures elapsed time rather than a number of trades, because the same number of trades is seconds on NQ and hours on a thin contract.
Gaps stay continuous, and honest
A multi-brick jump emits the intermediate bricks rather than one giant bar, and the session seals at its own close. Those filler bricks carry zero volume, because no trades happened at those levels — inflating them would corrupt every volume study on the chart.
Settings
| Setting | Default | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| Brick Size (ticks, 1 = auto) | 1 | Distance to continue in the same direction. 1 means work it out for this instrument. |
| Reversal (ticks, 0 = auto) | 0 | Distance to flip direction. Auto is twice the brick, and it is never allowed to be smaller than the brick — a cheaper reversal than continuation makes the chart flip on noise. |
| Open Offset (ticks, 0 = honest) | 0 | Cosmetic offset for the drawn open. |
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
Is a Renko reversal the same as a reversal bar?
No, and this trips up almost everyone. A Renko’s reversal setting is still a distance from a fixed anchor — how far price must travel the other way from the last brick’s close. A true reversal bar closes on a pullback from the bar’s own running extreme, so the trigger moves as the bar extends. A 200-tick run is about fifty Renko bricks, or one reversal bar.
What brick size should I use?
Leave it on auto to start and see what it picks for your instrument. Brick size does not transfer — a size that works on NQ will be wrong on CL. If you set it by hand and the size is obviously wrong for what the instrument is doing, it says so in the NinjaTrader log rather than letting you conclude the bar type is broken.
Does the last brick repaint?
Yes — the forming brick is not final until it completes, and that is true of every Renko implementation. It is also the classic Renko mistake. The included chart style draws the unfinished brick hollow with a dashed outline so you cannot mistake it for a settled one.
Does it work on the built-in candle style?
Yes. The bar type renders perfectly on NinjaTrader’s own candles; our chart style is optional.
The rest of the family
What else we make
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.