Renko Chart Settings: The Grid Nobody Lets You Choose

A Renko chart drops time from the axis. A brick appears when price has moved a fixed distance, and a quiet hour leaves no mark at all. That is what makes the trends look so clean.

It has one setting: the brick height.

Except that choosing the height does not finish the chart. The levels snap to multiples of the brick, and where that ladder of multiples starts is a second choice — one every implementation makes silently. A 20-pip brick has twenty possible grids.

Same 20-pip bricks, same rule, same year of USD/JPY 15-minute bars. Only the grid moved.

the other nine gridsthe grid a chart draws (offset 0)trade counts 1,004–1,057, essentially unchanged

Net pips ran from +221.9 to +3,082.5. Trade counts ran from 1,004 to 1,057 — essentially unchanged. The same amount of trading, and a 13.9-fold difference in the result.

How a Renko chart is built

Only the close matters.

Say the level sits at 148.00 with a 10-pip brick. A close at or above 148.10 stacks a brick upward and moves the level to 148.10. A close at or below 147.90 stacks one down. A bar that closes at 148.05 draws nothing at all.

Three consequences follow.

The level only lands on the grid

Levels snap to multiples of the brick. With a 10-pip brick they can only be …147.90 / 148.00 / 148.10…

So where does that ladder start? Every 10 pips from 148.00, or every 10 pips from 148.03? Both are a "10-pip brick chart", both are correct, and no charting package I have looked at exposes the choice.

Ten pips means ten possible grids; twenty means twenty. The implementation picks one and never mentions it.

One bar can complete several bricks

If the close is 35 pips from the level, that bar stacks three. The number of bricks does not match the number of bars.

On USD/JPY in 2025 with 10-pip bricks, bars completing two or more bricks numbered 1,189 on 15-minute, 1,260 on hourly and 721 on 4-hour data. By the moment you can see "three bricks in a row", all three may have arrived together.

It does forget its start date, and the cost is measured in price

Heikin Ashi never forgets where it was started — the Heikin Ashi article measures the halving. Renko does forget. The level is an integer address on a grid, so two series that reach the same address agree exactly from that bar onward.

How long that takes depends on the brick, because what is really needed is a distance in price.

Formiq's backtester warms up eight bars per pip of brick — 131 bars at 10 pips, 451 at 50 — which covers the 95th percentile above.

Adding a Renko chart in MT4, MT5 and TradingView

• TradingView — Renko is in the chart-type menu
• MT4 / MT5 — not a built-in chart type. It comes from an offline-chart script or a custom indicator that draws the bricks on a normal chart
• In a browser — Formiq's chart offers it as a chart type, and the backtester exposes the brick flip and brick runs as conditions

One warning about TradingView. Leaving the chart type on Renko while a strategy runs prices the fills at brick values too. The rest of this article is a measurement of exactly that difference.

How this was measured

Measured with Formiq's backtester. Entering the same settings reproduces the same numbers.

Every fill above comes from the candle, not the brick. The second half of the article measures why.

Ten grids at one brick height

Brick height, reading, year and timeframe all held. Only the grid moves — eighteen cells.

Across all eighteen cells the grid spread ran from 934.2 to 2,860.6 pips. In five of the eighteen, the sign of the year depends on which grid you got. The grid a chart actually draws — offset zero — placed a median 7th of ten, last three times and first once.

The 15-minute 10-pip cell in 2025 is the sharpest: one of the ten grids finished profitable, and it was not the one the chart draws.

Set that against the only knob a Renko chart offers, the brick height itself.

Ratios run 0.30 to 1.49, and in 3 of 18 cells the grid mattered more than the brick height did. The setting you cannot reach moves the answer by the same order of magnitude as the setting you can.

The best grid does not survive into the next year

The obvious response is to tune the grid. Taking the best offset of 2024 into 2025:

Two of nine finished last, and seven of nine came in at or below the median. The grid moves the result a great deal and carries none of it forward.

There is one practical instruction in this. A single Renko backtest is a point inside a band roughly a thousand to three thousand pips wide. Run several grids and keep what survives all of them; a number from one grid is a number from one grid.

The timeframe is still in the chart

Renko is described as having dropped time. The bricks contain none. But the bricks are built from bar closes, so which bars they were built from stays in the picture.

USD/JPY 2025, the same 10-pip brick throughout.

Identical price action, 2.4 times as many bricks. On 4-hour bars two bars in three complete a brick, so almost no compression is happening; on 15-minute bars three in four draw nothing.

And the share of bricks that reverse is set not by the brick height but by the brick height divided by the typical bar move. Where that column reads 1.65 / 0.82 / 0.41, the reversal rate reads 30.5 / 22.3 / 14.5%. That is the whole reason a small brick looks like a beautiful trend.

Choosing a brick height is choosing a coarseness relative to a timeframe, not escaping one.

Shuffled price changes make the same bricks

Is "three bricks in a row" evidence of anything? The control is the year's bar-to-bar changes put in a random order. The drift, the volatility and the tails are the market's; only the sequence is destroyed. Then the same bricks are built on top.

M15H1H4all fifteen sit on the diagonal (largest gap 2.4 points)

Across three timeframes and five brick heights, the share of bricks pointing the other way from the one before ran 8.5% to 41.6% on the real year and 8.5% to 43.4% on the shuffles. The largest disagreement in any cell is 2.4 points. Mean run length differs by −0.19 to +0.16 bricks, and total brick counts by a factor of 0.96 to 1.014.

A series with its order completely destroyed draws the same picture. The run lengths a Renko chart displays are set by the ratio of brick height to bar move, not by any persistence in price.

The mechanism is in the construction. With the level at 148.00 and price at 148.09, stacking upward needs a close of 148.10 and stacking downward needs 147.90. Continuation is near, reversal is far. That asymmetry manufactures trends out of sequence-free noise.

The results are not the picture

If the picture survives shuffling, do the results? The same rule was backtested on the shuffled series, ten shuffles averaged per cell.

The real year beat the control in 17 of 18 cells. The control itself finished profitable in 9 of 18 — roughly a coin toss, which is what a control should look like.

Two sentences carry the section. The arrangement of the bricks is not information: shuffling reproduces it. The trading result is: what shuffling destroys is how far price travels between one brick and the next.

Which is another way of saying that counting bricks is the wrong reading, and measuring the distance between them is the right one.

Filling at the brick level

A brick level is a price something genuinely traded at. That is the difference from Heikin Ashi, whose close is an average of four prices and none of them.

It does not help. A brick is only complete when the bar closes, and by then the price has moved past the level.

M15H1H417.3–48.6% of a brick, and favourable in all fifteen

In all fifteen cells the overshoot lands on the profitable side, without exception. Bricks stack in the direction price moved and stop short of it, so buying there buys below the market and selling there sells above it. One hundred percent of the time.

The same trades, priced both ways. Not one character of the strategy changes.

All 30 cells improved, and 4 of them turned a losing year into a winning one. The lift per trade ran from 4.26 to 39.28 pips.

It has a closed form. The overshoot is collected once at each end of a trade, so lift per trade = mean overshoot × 2; measured over eighteen cells the ratio came out between 0.908 and 1.024. That is cost = trades × spread with the sign reversed, and it grows with the brick.

Heikin Ashi's close is a price that never existed. Renko's is a price that existed and is gone. Neither is a price you can fill at.

Brick height and the reversal rule

Grid fixed at zero, brick flip, one brick to reverse.

The best height moves between years and timeframes. Hourly bars wanted 15 pips in both years; 15-minute bars wanted 30 in 2025 and 10 in 2024. Too small and the trade count eats it (a 5-pip brick on 15-minute bars takes 4,841 trades, which is 1,452 pips of spread); too large and single trades dominate.

Formiq defaults to 10 pips. Of 60 settings that ranked 40th and 16th on 15-minute bars in 2025 and 2024, 10th and 37th on hourly, 12th and 30th on 4-hour — mid-table, moving with the year.

The reversal rule was measured too. One draws each brick as it arrives; two is the traditional rule MT4 and the textbooks use, where a turn has to give back two bricks.

The traditional rule finished ahead in 16 of 36 cells — a dead heat overall, with a clear pattern inside it. Two bricks to reverse helps small bricks and hurts large ones. It cuts the trade count to between 43% and 84%, which is relief where there was too much trading and starvation where there was already too little.

Waiting for a run of bricks

The other reading waits for N bricks in one direction. A run of one is the plain flip, so the bottom of the ladder lands on something already measured (20-pip bricks, reverse on one).

Best at two, collapsing from four, in three of the four rows. Hourly 2024 does the opposite and improves all the way to five, so the shape of the ladder is not stable either.

Overall, patience cost money. The 2025 medians for the brick flip were +1,166.0 pips on 15-minute bars, +1,611.5 on hourly and +786.1 on 4-hour; for brick runs they were −106.6, +290.6 and −289.3.

Because a single bar can complete several bricks, the run is counted as "reached N", not "is exactly N". A bar that stacks three at once satisfies a run of two on the way past.

Out of sample: each year's best, tested on the other

Of the 60 settings per timeframe, the best of one year measured in the other.

All three 2024 winners took 17, 27 and 30 trades. All three landed 42nd, 43rd and 43rd of 60 in 2025. Thin samples produce loud numbers that reverse — the same shape twelve articles in this series have found.

The exception runs the other way: 2025's 4-hour winner traded 364 times and still placed 2nd in 2024. Settings with a real sample size are the ones that survive.

Rank correlations:

0.37, 0.21 and −0.07 across years, against about 0.75 across halves of one year. What a setting is worth belongs to the market it was measured in.

Win rate, and why it matters more here

The brick flip won 36.5% to 38.1% of its trades — an ordinary trend-following profile.

Winners are about 1.7 times the size of losers, which is what carries a sub-40% win rate.

The rank correlation between win rate and net pips is high for this series — 0.308 to 0.811 where most articles find something near zero. Renko standardises the losses. A rule that turns on one brick loses roughly the distance travelled and given back, every time, so with the loss size pinned the win rate does the work.

Filters, stops and cost

Built on hourly bars, 20-pip bricks, the brick flip.

ADX hurt in both years — a trend filter on top of a trend rule, the same result the GMMA article found. Session filters did not help either.

Stops and targets helped in 2024 and did not in 2025. Only the time exit improved 2025, by 636.4 pips. A knob that points opposite ways in two years is not a setting.

Cost tracked the trade count exactly.

To the pip. Break-even spreads were 2.48 pips for the hourly 20-pip flip, 5.87 with the traditional reversal, 1.67 on 15-minute bars, and 0.24 for the hourly run of three. A setting that waits for three bricks dies to a quarter-pip of extra spread.

What this test supports

1. The grid is decided before the brick height is. Ten grids at a fixed 20-pip brick gave +221.9 to +3,082.5 pips on 15-minute USD/JPY in 2025. Across eighteen cells that spread ran 934.2 to 2,860.6 pips, which is 0.30 to 1.49 times the spread across six brick heights
2. You cannot pick the good grid. The best offset of 2024 landed at or below the median in seven of nine cells in 2025 and last in two. Read a single-grid backtest as one point inside that band
3. Time is still in the chart. The same 10-pip brick made 8,041 bricks from 15-minute bars and 3,298 from 4-hour ones in the same year, and the reversal rate follows brick height ÷ mean bar move
4. A run of bricks is not evidence. Shuffled price changes reproduce the reversal rate to within 2.4 points. The results still beat the shuffled control in 17 of 18 cells, so what works is the distance between bricks and not their count
5. Never fill at the brick. It is a real price that the bar has already left by a mean of 2.17 to 18.43 pips, favourably in all fifteen cells. Repricing there improved all 30 cells and turned +1,491.5 pips into +10,500 on hourly 20-pip bricks

Related reading

• Heikin Ashi settings — the other indicator in this series that rewrites the candles. Its close is a price that never existed; Renko's is one that existed and is gone. Two different routes to the same broken fill
• Moving average crossover settings — the same "follow the direction it moved" shape, measured with lines instead of bricks
• Psychological line settings — another indicator on a ladder, where the number you type is not the rule you get
• GMMA settings — where stacking a trend filter on a trend rule made it worse, exactly as it does here

Limits of this test

• USD/JPY only. 2024 rose 1,632 pips and 2025 finished 56 pips lower. Brick-stacking rules flatter a trending year, and other pairs or other years will reorder these tables
• Only ten of the possible grids. A 20-pip brick has twenty; ten were measured. The spreads quoted are a floor
• The shuffled control throws away the shape of the bar. It reconnects closes only, so highs and lows carry no information in it. It is a valid control only for rules that read closes
• Two reversal rules. Some implementations require three bricks to turn
• Renko itself differs between implementations. Building from closes and building from highs and lows are both in use; this test builds from closes
• No execution detail. Spread is fixed at 0.3 pips, with no widening around releases and no rejected fills