Renko Charts vs Tick Charts
Renko charts print a brick only when price moves a fixed amount, so time and volume are discarded and every brick looks identical. Tick charts close a bar after a fixed number of trades, so activity paces the chart while the real open, high, low and close are preserved.
Both of these start from the same objection: the clock has nothing to do with what the market is doing. They then answer it differently, and one of the two answers costs you far more than the other.
What each one is
A renko chart prints a brick when price has moved a fixed amount and prints nothing otherwise. Time does not appear on it and volume is not represented at all. Renko charts covers the construction.
A tick chart closes a bar after a fixed number of trades, keeping the real open, high, low and close inside it. Tick charts covers the mechanism, and candlesticks covers the bar it preserves.
One keeps the bar and one replaces it. Whereas a tick chart changes only when a bar ends, renko replaces the bar with a uniform block, so every brick is the same height regardless of what it took to produce.
Where they differ
Whether effort is visible. On a tick chart a violent bar and a quiet one look different, because the prices inside them differ. Every renko brick is identical, so a move that took three trades and one that took thirty thousand are drawn the same way.
Whether time is on the chart. Renko has no time axis in any meaningful sense — a stretch of ten bricks might be an hour or a fortnight. A tick chart also detaches from the clock, but bar count still tracks activity, so the horizontal axis means something.
Whether the newest bar is settled. A tick bar closes when the trade count is reached and is then final. A renko brick only appears once price has travelled the brick size, so the current state of the chart is provisional — a move that stalls halfway leaves no trace at all.
What each needs from the data. Renko needs prices only, so it works anywhere. A tick chart needs a genuine trade count, which means futures and listed stocks, and not spot foreign exchange where the count belongs to one broker.
Where they agree
Both reject the clock as a bar boundary, which is the objection they share and the reason they get compared.
Both give you levels nobody else is watching. Your brick size and your tick count are yours, so neither produces the shared, partly self-fulfilling levels that hourly and daily bars do.
Neither tells you whether a trend exists. Direction runs on this site’s shared series average 2.01 bars with a longest of 11, and changing the bar rule does not change the market.
And both cost the same to trade — 0.0098 a round trip here, about 2% of the median bar range of 0.493.
Which one to use
Run a tick chart when you want the clock gone and the prices kept. It is the smaller change and it costs you nothing except the shared levels, whereas renko costs you two whole dimensions of the data.
Run renko when you only want to see structure. Higher highs and lower lows are easier to read when every unit is the same size, and that is a real benefit for someone whose problem is seeing the shape of a move.
Run renko when volume data does not exist for your instrument anyway. If you were never going to use volume, discarding it costs you less.
And keep a plain candlestick chart open for either. Both detach you from the session structure and from every level anyone else is watching.
Why discarding time costs more than it seems
Because how long a move took is information about conviction. Ten bricks in twenty minutes and ten bricks over three weeks are the same picture on a renko chart and completely different events, and there is no setting that recovers the difference.
And because thin markets move price cheaply. A brick printed on almost no trading looks identical to one printed on heavy participation, so the chart type is least reliable exactly where price moves are least meaningful.
The original data
Of the 24,971 unique videos in the search corpus, no title compares these two directly. Tick charts appear in 55 titles at a median of 90,218 views across 45 channels. Renko appears in 72, at a median of 5,347 across 42.
Similar coverage, seventeen times the median audience on one of them. Renko is taught slightly more and sought far less, which is unusual — most alternative chart types trade on how good they look, and renko looks the cleanest of any of them while drawing the smallest audience here.
On the chart above renko cannot answer and the tick chart can. Bar count on one of them is a measure of activity; brick count on the other is only a measure of distance.
When it fails
The characteristic failure is backtesting on renko and believing the result. A brick appears only once price has already travelled the brick size, so an entry recorded at the brick’s edge is an entry at a price that had already been passed — and because bricks are uniform, the test’s drawdowns look smaller and its trends look longer than anything achievable. The results are not merely optimistic, they describe fills that were not available, and the chart gives no indication that this is happening.
A second failure is treating brick count as a measure of strength. It measures distance travelled and nothing else.
A third is carrying indicator settings across. A fourteen-period average of bricks is fourteen units of distance, which is not a period of time in any sense.
A fourth is using a tick chart on spot foreign exchange, where the trade count is one broker’s.
And a fifth is expecting either chart’s levels to hold, when nobody else is looking at your bar rule.
Related
Renko charts covers brick size and the provisional last brick. Tick charts covers activity-paced bars. And candlesticks covers the bar renko replaces.
Renko’s appeal is that it looks like a solved chart, and it looks that way because it has thrown away two of the three things a bar contains. What is left is genuinely useful for seeing structure and genuinely useless for judging effort.
— Michael Whitman
This page is educational, not financial advice. Test every idea on your own charts before risking money.