How to Use Renko Charts on Tradovate

Renko takes time off the chart. Instead of printing a bar every minute or every 500 ticks, it drops a new brick only when price travels a set distance you choose. Quiet chop gets compressed into a handful of bricks, and a real move stacks brick after brick in one direction. Tradovate builds Renko into its charts, so you can switch to it in two clicks and size the bricks yourself. Here's the exact path.

What a Renko Chart Actually Shows

Each brick is a fixed price move. Once price closes past the top of the last brick by your chosen size, a new up brick prints; drop past the bottom and a down brick prints. Bricks never share a candle's sense of time, so a slow hour and a fast minute can both produce a single brick. That's the whole point: you're filtering out the small back-and-forth and looking at direction only. It suits trend and breakout traders who want less noise on screen.

Before You Start

Any Tradovate account with charting works here, whether it's a simulated account, a funded personal account, or a prop-firm evaluation. Advanced Charting, which includes Renko, Heikin Ashi, and Point & Figure, ships built into the platform now, so there's nothing extra to install. If you're new to the Chart module itself, run through Tradovate charting basics first, then come back here.

Switch a Tradovate Chart to Renko: Step-by-Step

Picking a Brick Size That Fits

Brick size is the whole personality of a Renko chart. Too small and you get a wall of tiny bricks that chatter as much as candles; too large and you miss the move entirely. A common starting point is to base it on recent volatility rather than a round number, for example roughly half to one times the daily Average True Range of your instrument, then adjust from there. Whatever you pick, remember the value is in ticks, so check your contract's tick size before you type.

One thing to watch: on very low timeframes some builds of the desktop chart can render Renko bricks with a slight offset or the odd irregular plot. If your bricks look off, bump the timeframe up or size the bricks a little larger, and confirm the current behaviour on your build.

Automate This with PickMyTrade

Trading a Renko setup by hand is fine until you want your TradingView signals to fire the entry for you. PickMyTrade routes TradingView alerts straight into Tradovate so your bricks-based strategy executes without you sitting on the mouse.

That's the full loop: open a chart, switch the Chart Type to Renko, size the brick in ticks, and save it. Tune the size to how your instrument moves and you'll have a chart that shows trend and ignores the noise.