A Renko chart forms bricks of a certain size, and only forms a new brick once the price moves that amount. This helps filter out price noise, shows the dominant trend, and can be used as a trailing stop loss.

The forex market, like any market, has big trending periods and times when it chops around. Renko charts can help capture the bulk of these trends (and thus profits) when they occur.

No single tool is going to make someone a great, or even profitable, trader. Yet certain tools may help us see the market better, or help us stick to our trading plan better.

Renko charts are one of those tools. Throughout my 17+ year trading career, I have mostly used profit targets to extract profit from the market. Targets are effective, but using Renko charts to exit trades can also work. A profit target is an offsetting order that gets me out of the trade when the desired profit level has been reached. This profit target level is based on an analysis of how that asset typically moves.

For many people, profit targets introduce a couple of problems. You need to have a plan for when the price almost reaches your target but then reverses. You also need to analyze past trades to see if you are setting your targets correctly—on average. Are the profit targets not being hit? That’s a problem. If the price is surging past your profit target, that could be a problem because a lot of money is being left on the table. 

Profit targets are great! As I said, I have used them successfully for many years, and still use them with many of my strategies. 

Yet there is also value in having strategies that attempt to capture as much of the trend as possible, without getting out at a predetermined level. This is where Renko charts come in.

If you struggle to stay in your trades long enough, or you want to capture bigger moves, or you struggle with picking profit targets, Renko charts may help. As mentioned they aren’t a fix-all…they have problems too. I will discuss the cons of Renko charts a bit later, but for now, let’s look at what Renko charts are, and how you can use them to capture big trending price moves.

Renko Charts and Stocks

I don’t use Renko charts on stocks. They don’t fit my stock trading style (or at least I have not felt the need to incorporate Renkos in my stock trading). This is mainly because stock prices can change so much over time. This means Renko setting can become quickly obsolete or irrelevant.

Renko charts may work well for day trading stocks, where the price doesn’t change as much. Or they may work well in stocks that tend to stay within the same price area for extended periods of time.

I have only used Renko charts for swing trading forex.

For a complete stock swing trading method, my Complete Method Stock Swing Trading Course lays out how to find stocks ready to pop higher.

What are Renko Charts

Renko charts only factor in price movement, not time. 

They are created by boxes, which are never side-by-side, and only move at 45-degree angles. 

Charts from TradingView.

The trader chooses a box size, say 30 pips, so a new box will form when the price moves 30 pips from the last box (0.0030 in most pairs). The box size you choose will vary by the pair being traded, your strategy, and is a subjective assessment. We’ll discuss how to pick box size a bit later.

When the price is dropping, the boxes are typically colored red or black, and if the price is rising the boxes are green or white. 

If the price is rising (series of green boxes), a new box will form when the price rises 30 pips from the close (top of box) of the last box. In order to reverse, the price will need to move 60 pips to the downside from the last close (top of box). This is because there are no side-by-side boxes. So the first red box won’t be confirmed until the price moves 60 pips below the top of the last green box (or 30 pips from the bottom of the green box). Sound a little confusing. Look at the chart and hopefully that will help clear things up.

The same concept applies to a downtrend. The price needs to rally by 60 pips from the close or bottom of a red box (or 30 pips from the top) in order to get a confirmed green box going in the opposite direction.

Wick can be added (optional) to show if the price moved outside a prior box, but the move was not confirmed… Renko charts are built based on closing prices for a chosen timeframe. If 1-minute closes are chosen, the Renko chart will look for 1-minute closing prices to create the boxes. If a 15-minute, 1-hour, or daily timeframe is chosen, the Renko boxes will only be created once those closing figures are in. Choosing a timeframe is also an important decision. 

Most charting services still show you the real-time price of the asset on the Renko chart.

In the chart below, a 50 pip box size has been added to the GBPJPY, based on 5-minute closing prices. 50 pips is a randomly chosen box size and not a recommendation.

The price bottoms at 131 on the far left. That doesn’t mean that the price didn’t actually go below that, it means the price didn’t have a 5-minute close below 130.50 (because then a new box would have formed).*

The price then rallied and we would get our first complete green bar when the price has a 5-minute close above 132 (when a box/brick is not yet complete, it still shows up, but is hollow, or a different color, like yellow).

The price trends nicely with a couple of short-term pullbacks. Then the price gets quite choppy. Anyone attempting to use Renko to capture a trend would have likely lost money during this period, as the price simply didn’t trend and the Renko boxes just oscillate back and forth. Finally, at the far right of the chart, another trend develops.

There is a time scale along the bottom of the chart, but a Renko box will take however long it needs to form. The month of October takes up almost the entire chart, while November takes a small portion of the chart on the right side. Larger price movement equals more boxes. Less movement equals fewer boxes and thus less space on the chart.

*TradingView has limited intraday data. Therefore, many of their charts default to hourly or longer the further back you view. Therefore, the Renko charts are accurate in realtime but not suitable for backtesting purposes, since they will typically be showing you Renko boxes based on hourly closing prices which could be very different than Renko boxes based on 1-minute closing prices. 

For solid backtesting and accuracy when using Renko charts, I suggest software such as  Forex Tester 5 which allows you to download historical 1-minute data (and even tick data…which is every transaction) so you get the most reliable backtesting possible. It replicates what it would have been like trading actually trading at various time in the past (backtest and trade days/weeks going back 25 years).

Using Renko Charts to Capture Trends

When the price is trending, Renko charts provide a simple way to stick with the trend. Don’t exit until there is a reversal—a confirmed box of the opposite color.

Traders can use typical technical analysis to help identify potential turning points or the start of a trend, and then use Renko charts to stick with that trend, or a trader could simply trade based on Renko. Essentially, a Renko chart can act as a trailing stop loss.

A new box color equals a potential trend change, so a new position could be initiated. This method can result in lots of losing trades when the price is choppy, but the positive is that the trader will be involved in every big trend that happens. 

For most traders, a fusion of typical technical analysis (on a candlestick chart, or other conventional chart types) coupled with Renko could help traders stick with a big trend when it develops. Try using your typical entry, and then a Renko chart for the exit to help stick with the trend.

I use Renko only on certain forex pairs that I have found to trend quite well. I then find a box size that allows me to capture the bulk of the price moves, but also minimizes the whipsaw periods. Unfortunately, the whipsaw periods can’t be avoided…if the price is oscillating back and forth, so will Renko charts. 

With Renko charts, there is the possibility of always being in the market. When an opposite box color forms, exit the prior trade and enter a new one. The strategy will lose during choppy periods but will always capture the big moves when they happen. As mentioned, this only seems to work with certain box sizes, and some pairs tend to trend better than others. If you can find a way to avoid some of the choppy periods, that will aid performance greatly. I discussed this strategy in my Facebook group, and how well it did during the Covid-19 price moves. The strategy captured more than 200% in a little over 2 months. But then I did stop trading it to do more research because the backtesting I had originally done was limited. Also, prices were experiencing strong trends, and I suspected they would eventually revert back to being more choppy.

Therefore, it is also recommended to implement rules for when NOT to use this strategy. If you see prices are moving a lot, then use it. If prices are choppy, don’t.

You can see how a strategy performs by adding up all your profits and losses on the Renko chart. Add some slippage to each trade. Seeing how a strategy performs over a long period of time will also allow you to estimate the maximum drawdown, which can be used to fine-tune position size.

The GBPJPY chart below is what happened next after the chart above. A long is initiated at 140.50 once a green bar forms (it won’t form until the price closes above 140.50 on the 5-minute chart timeframe selected). The trade lasts until a red box completes, triggering an exit of the long and a short trade at 146.50. That’s a 600 pip gain. The profit and losses, in pips, are marked at the entry point of the trade. The last trade was still in progress (notice the different colored and incomplete box at the far right) when the screenshot was taken.

Recall that because Tradingview does not provide much historical intraday data, this chart is for demonstration purposes only. Actual results if using closing prices less than 1-hour (which TradingView defaults to on historical data) could be quite different.

The chart clearly shows that during trends the gains can accumulate quickly…but during choppy periods the losses can mount quickly as well. 

By no means does a trader need to utilize this type of strategy where they are always in the market. It just highlights the ability to stay with the trend. This strategy picked up 800 pips in a couple of months and encaptures a good trending period as well as a rougher choppy period. 

So Renko charts still have their pros and cons! They help with sticking with the trend, but if you can’t handle the whipsaw period, you will need to find a method to help you avoid them or minimize the damage. Some options include:

• If you have 4 or 5 losing trades in a row stop using the strategy until there is a breakout of the choppy period on the Renko chart.
• Use a traditional candlestick chart to help you avoid choppy times. 
• Use your own entry strategy and then see if Renko charts provide a good exit.

Picking a Renko Box Size and Closing Timeframe

Renko box size is subjective. There is no rule that works for every currency pair. I just eyeball the chart, and try a few different box sizes. If it is too choppy I try increasing the box size. Does that help? Then I try decreasing it, because maybe there are trends to be captured within the choppy trading.

Smaller boxes mean more trend changes and more trades.

Big boxes mean fewer trend changes and fewer trades. 

As for picking a timeframe, using daily closes, for example, will delay the creation of Renko boxes, and could mean a whole bunch appear at once. If you are using Renko for trading signals, the daily chart timeframe is useless. In the example above where we used a 50 pips box on the GBPJPY chart; imagine there is a news announcement and over the course of the day the price rises 300 pips. That is 6 boxes! If you use a daily Renko timeframe those six boxes won’t be confirmed until the end of the day, and the price is already 300 pips and 6 boxes away from where it was yesterday. With a 1-minute timeframe, boxes start getting confirmed right away as the 1-minute closing prices come in, so the trader can capture those boxes of potential profit. 

I use a 1-minute interval. This is because I want the Renko boxes to form quickly. If the price moves the box amount, it will get a closing price quite quickly and that box will form.

You will get fewer whipsaws using a daily timeframe, but this is deceiving because maybe the price was moving wildly during the day exposing you to massive risk, yet by the end of the day price hasn’t moved and so the Renko makes it look like nothing happened. 

As with all charts and strategies, gaps and sharp price movements happen. So even if you use a 1-minute time frame, the real-time price may be different (and long gone) even seconds after a new Renko box forms. This is especially likely around high-impact news when the price can move very swiftly.

The Drawbacks of Renko Charts

A few drawbacks have already been addressed:

• Not so helpful for trade signals in choppy periods (although it does highlight choppy periods very well.)
• The price has to move quite a bit to cause a reversal. This is good and bad. The good part is it helps keep us in moves until there is a meaningful reversal, but it also means we give up a chunk of profit by waiting for the reversal. I don’t mind this because it is very hard to get out at tops and bottoms anyway.

This brings up a couple of other problems. Since we are likely going to be waiting for boxes to form and be confirmed (a closing price on the timeframe chosen), we may face quite a bit of slippage by waiting for that confirmation. Assume there is a big news announcement at 8:30 AM. A new one minute time period has just started, so the closing price won’t come in for another 59 seconds. The price is skyrocketing, and you will start to see boxes form, possibly many of them, but they aren’t confirmed yet. 

By the time they are confirmed the price could be miles away from the entry price expected. In hindsight the chart makes it look like you could have easily gotten in because all those boxes appear at 45-degree angles, but the price may have jumped inside of your 1-minute timeframe (whatever timeframe you use) resulting in you missing a good chunk of that trade.

Some may argue “Don’t wait for boxes to be confirmed!” but that also has its problems. The price will move all over the place and will constantly be starting boxes it never confirms. That is the point of Renko charts—they force you to slow down and only focus on moves of a certain magnitude. Unless a box is confirmed, and the price has moved that certain amount, the information is ignored.

Also, a lot of platforms won’t allow for proper backtesting of Renko charts because historical data shown on the chart more than a few days ago will be based on hourly (or greater) closes, and not 1-minute or tick data. The chart may look great for your settings, but in actuality, it would not have performed the same in real-time.

Sierra Charts or Forex Tester 5 remedies this. 

Notice on the time scale (in a couple of spots), it is still showing 1-minute time intervals, even though I have scrolled back on this chart to a number of years in the past.

Position Sizing with Renko Charts

Just like with any chart type, you need to set stop losses on each trade. It is also important to understand how much of a drawdown you could take in a rough period using Renko charts. 

See Three Effective Forex Position Sizing Methods.

If you plan to use Renko charts to always be in the market, you NEED to know what your maximum drawdown is. This is covered in the video and in the Maximum Drawdown section. If you are going to use Renko charts periodically, the 1% or fixed sizing methods are fine, but I would also recommend incorporating the maximum drawdown approach as well.

To Use or Not Use Renko Charts

There is no need to use Renko charts, this is not an endorsement of them. Use what works for you. I have a strategy that is based on them, and I use Renko charts for that strategy. I only deploy it in times of great forex volatility, typically when the stock market is crashing which means big decisive moves in certain currencies. I still use conventional charts for other strategies.

If they help you, create a strategy around them. If you don’t like them, don’t use them. But just for fun, add up what your profits and losses would be using a Renko chart (add in some slippage on each trade), and then compare that to your current approach. If you are struggling with your trading, simplifying may be a good starting point. Renko charts help simplify sticking with the trend.

If you want more forex trading methods, check out my EURUSD Day Trading Course. It has specific price-action strategies for trading the EURUSD in 2 hours or less a day.

By Cory Mitchell, CMT

Disclaimer: Nothing in this article is personal investment advice, or advice to buy or sell anything. Trading is risky and can result in substantial losses, even more than deposited if using leverage.