Candlesticks vs Renko Charts

Michael Whitman · Trading since 2017, full-time since 2020 · Published 2026-09-08 · Updated 2026-10-19 · Reviewed 2026-10-04

A candlestick chart prints one bar for every slice of the clock, whether anything happened or not. A renko chart prints only when price has moved far enough, so it erases the quiet and stacks the busy. On 60 sessions of SPY that trade-off can be counted brick by brick.

What each one is

A candlestick is one period of time drawn as four prices. Open, high, low and close, and every bar covers the same length of clock. Candlesticks covers how to read one.

A renko brick is one fixed move in price. It prints when the close has traveled a set distance beyond the last brick, whenever that happens. Renko charts covers the build.

Renko is built from the candles’ own closes. It adds nothing to the data; it decides which of the closes to show.

Where they differ

What the horizontal axis means. On candlesticks it is time, while on renko it is only the order in which bricks happened to print, so a brick can stand for five minutes or most of a week.

Whether the wicks survive. A candle keeps its high and low, whereas a close-based brick ignores both, so a spike that reversed inside the bar never appears.

What the setting does. A candle’s period is a slice of clock you can name. A brick size is a price distance, and the chart’s shape depends on it far more than on anything the market did.

How a gap is shown. A candlestick shows an opening gap as empty space. Renko fills it with bricks, all printed by one bar, which look like a run of steady movement.

What the bricks did to 60 sessions of SPY

The count depended on the size, not the market. From the same five-minute closes, $1 bricks printed 422 times, $2 bricks 140 and $4 bricks 38. The 60 daily candles, of course, stayed 60.

Quiet days disappeared. With $2 bricks, 12 of the 60 sessions printed no new brick at all, and the median session printed 2.

Busy days stacked up. On 29 July 2026, when SPY’s range ran $13.58, the chart printed 11 bricks; the quietest session of the 60 ranged less than a fifth as far.

Time stretched and shrank. Of the bricks that needed a new bar, the median took 19 five-minute bars to form, about an hour and a half of trading. The slowest took 336 bars, from 14:05 on 20 August to 09:35 on 27 August, more than four full sessions, and 17 bricks printed on the very same bar as the brick before them.

Which one to use: Candlesticks or Renko Charts?

Use candlesticks as the chart you act on. Fills, stops, session opens and data releases all live on the clock, and only the candle chart keeps it.

Use renko when long quiet stretches bury the moves you are looking for. Twelve brickless sessions out of 60 show how much a fixed brick can compress.

Use renko only with the brick size written down. At $1 and $4 the same weeks produced charts with more than ten times as many bricks between them.

And when your rule involves a time of day, stay on candlesticks. A brick printed at 09:30 after an overnight gap and one printed mid-afternoon look the same.

A gap turned into bricks: SPY, 17 July 2026

The candles. SPY’s last five-minute bar on 16 July closed at $750.76. The first bar on 17 July opened at $742.08, traded no higher than $742.62 and closed at $741.03, $9.73 below the previous close.

The bricks. With $2 bricks, that single bar printed four down bricks in a row. On the renko chart it looks like a steady four-step decline; on the candle chart it is one gap at the open.

Why it matters. A sell stop placed a brick or two under the last brick, anywhere between $742.62 and $750.76, had no regular-hours trade at its price. It would have filled near the $742.08 open, lower than any brick edge suggested.

The original data

The sample. Five-minute SPY bars downloaded from Yahoo Finance: the 60 regular sessions between 10 July and 2 October 2026, 09:30 to 16:00 New York time. Sixty sessions is a small sample, three months of one instrument in one season, so these are descriptions, not general rates.

The renko rule. Close-based bricks of a fixed size, the close setting StockCharts describes. The turn rule is the common construction, not something StockCharts spells out: an up brick needs a close one brick above the top of the last brick and a down brick a close one brick below its bottom, so turning around takes two bricks of movement; one close can print several bricks. The starting point is an uncounted brick from the first close rounded down to the brick size, and bricks run on across the overnight gaps. With $2 bricks the direction changed 40 times over the 140 bricks.

The files. Bricks per session with each session’s range are in the SPY renko bricks per session file, and every $2 brick with the bar that printed it is in the SPY $2 renko brick file.

When it fails

The failure is testing a rule on bricks and trading it on candles, and finding a different market. A renko test sees no move smaller than a brick, no wick and no gap, so a stop one brick away looks safe in the record. On the candle chart the same stop sits inside every spike the bricks ignored and every gap they filled in, like the four bricks of 17 July. The fills, the stop-outs and the number of trades all change, and the test described a chart that cannot be traded.

The second failure is choosing the brick size by how clean the past looks. That fits the chart to history.

A third is reading a brick stack as a trend. Four of them came from one bar.

A fourth is using renko for anything scheduled. There is no clock on it.

And a fifth is comparing renko charts with different brick sizes. They are different charts.

Related

Candlesticks explains the four prices each bar keeps. Renko charts explains the brick rule and its one setting. And heikin ashi is a smoothed chart that keeps the time axis.

This page is educational, not financial advice. Test every idea on your own charts before risking money.