Renko Charts vs Footprint Charts
Renko charts print a uniform brick whenever price moves a fixed amount, discarding time and volume completely. A footprint chart keeps every trade, showing how much volume went through at each price inside the bar and whether it hit the bid or lifted the ask.
These are the two ends of a single scale: how much of what actually happened survives onto the screen. Renko keeps the least of any common chart type and a footprint keeps everything, and almost every practical difference follows from that.
What each one is
A renko chart prints a uniform brick when price has moved a fixed amount. No time axis, no volume, and every brick the same height. Renko charts covers the construction.
A footprint chart shows the volume traded at every price inside a bar, split by whether each trade hit the bid or lifted the ask. Footprint charts covers how to read one, and candlesticks covers the ordinary bar both depart from.
One is a summary of a summary and the other is the raw record. Whereas renko reduces an entire stretch of trading to a step, a footprint retains the individual trades that made it, which is a difference in kind rather than in presentation.
Where they differ
Whether effort is visible at all. Every renko brick looks the same, so a move fought over by thousands of participants and one that drifted on almost nothing are drawn identically. A footprint’s entire purpose is to distinguish those two.
Whether you can see who was aggressive. A footprint separates trades that lifted the ask from those that hit the bid, which is the one thing no price-only chart can reconstruct. Renko does not even retain volume, let alone its direction.
What each costs to obtain. Renko needs only prices, so it works on any instrument and any free feed. A footprint needs time-and-sales with trade direction, which in practice means a paid subscription and a market with a real centralised tape.
Whether the current state is settled. A renko brick only prints once price has travelled the full brick size, so a stalled move leaves no mark. Every footprint bar reports what traded as it traded.
Where they agree
Both are backward-looking. Neither predicts anything, and the resolution gap does not change that.
Neither tells you whether a trend exists. Direction runs on this site’s shared series average 2.01 bars with a longest of 11, whichever way the bars are drawn.
Both cost the same to trade — 0.0098 a round trip here, about 2% of the median bar range of 0.493.
And both detach you from the session. Neither carries the shared hourly and daily levels that a large number of other people are watching.
Which one to use
Run a footprint when the question is whether a level is being defended. Absorption — heavy volume at a price with no progress through it — is visible on one of these two and structurally invisible on the other.
Run renko when you want to see the shape of a move and nothing else. Higher highs and lower lows are easier to read when every unit is identical, and for somebody whose problem is seeing structure that is a real benefit.
Run renko when no real tape exists for your instrument. On spot foreign exchange a footprint is inferred rather than observed, so the cheaper chart is also the more honest one.
And keep plain candlesticks open with either, because one of them has no prices you would place an order at and the other has too many.
Why deleting volume is the expensive part
Because price movement without participation is the cheapest thing a market produces. A thin book moves a long way on very little, and renko draws that identically to a move that took real size — so the chart is least reliable precisely where price is least meaningful.
And because that is where most false breakouts live. The move that looked decisive and reversed immediately is usually the one nobody participated in, which is exactly the fact renko has removed.
The original data
Of the 24,971 unique videos in the search corpus, no title compares these two directly. Renko appears in 72 titles at a median of 5,347 views across 42 channels. Footprint charts appear in 17, at a median of 22,330 across 17 channels — one channel each, none of them returning to the subject.
Four times the videos, a quarter of the audience. The free chart type that looks tidy is covered far more than the paid one that carries the information, which is a fact about what is easy to make a video about rather than about which is more useful at a chart.
On the chart above only one of them can answer, and the other has discarded the evidence irretrievably rather than merely compressed it.
When it fails
The characteristic failure is trusting a renko backtest. A brick prints only after price has already travelled the brick size, so an entry logged at the brick edge is an entry at a price that had already gone past — and since every brick is uniform, the equity curve that results is smoother, the trends longer and the drawdowns shallower than anything that was actually available. The chart offers no warning, because it looks exactly as clean during the test as it does live, and the discrepancy only appears as a persistent gap between backtested and real fills.
A second failure is reading a footprint on inferred data. Where the aggressor side is guessed rather than reported, the display looks identical to a real one.
A third is treating brick count as effort. It is distance, and only distance.
A fourth is carrying indicator settings onto renko, where a fourteen-period average spans fourteen units of price rather than any period of time.
And a fifth is finding a story in every footprint bar, which the detail will always support after the fact.
Related
Renko charts covers brick size and the provisional last brick. Footprint charts covers the intrabar detail and the data it needs. And candlesticks covers the ordinary bar both depart from.
If you had to rank chart types by how much of the original event survives, these two would be the ends of the list. That does not make the footprint automatically better — it makes the choice unusually clear, because you are deciding how much you want to know rather than which style you prefer.
— Michael Whitman
This page is educational, not financial advice. Test every idea on your own charts before risking money.