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let's say your box size is 10 ticks. And the last bar is a down bar that closes at 100.00
The new bar "opens" at 100.00, if that new bar runs to 99.91, it still has not created a new down box, additionally, it can then go all the way from 99.91 back North, all the way until it reaches 100.19, because at 100.20 is when it will make a new green/higher bar.
So the range for the bar is really 30 ticks (100.20 down to 99.90)
So if you backtested and had a trailing stop of 2 box increments, it's possible, that in our example, the trail was activated if the price then retraced BACk to the downside and made a new bar opening at 99.90.
What BigMike was saying, that the openings don't line up, is because if the last bar was a down bar and to stick with our example...closed at 100.00
if the bar retraces and begins to climb and hits 100.20 and closes a "green" or up bar, the historical chart will actually show the open at 100.10 (not 100.00) NOR will it show if the price actually went lower than the true open of the bar.
If you actually run a live strategy on renko, with tick/tick entries or exits, you'll begin to notice transactions that ocurr OUTSIDE the actual bars...because the bar only plots new bricks up or downs, it doesn't plot the rest of the story.
That's the original intent of a renko chart, that it removes all the "noise" of the price action and that's why you see these nice, beautiful strings of same colored bars in trends....
When in actuality, there was most likely, a lot of price movement around some of the bars during a trend...you just don't see it, because renko removes all the excess information.
Like I said, Renko is useful (in it's original form) for identifying overall/higher time frame trends and also it's very useful for visualizing support/resistance points (if you see a double top where the brick highs are equal, or a triple top).
You actually have the ability to run 2 data streams. (with MC). TS has the ability to use workarounds such as globaldictionary and globalvariables...but you still cannot backtest (even end of bar, no IOG). I'd be satisfied simply backtesting with the true ranges/tails/wicks included.
Renko is also very useful for identifying trend reversals/pivot points.
IF you can plot the improved Renko with tails/wicks, you can notice some pretty strong entry points where there are a reversal bar with a very long tail/wick. You'll begin to notice that reversals always feature a wick that's the length of a bar (at least) but sometimes, the wick can be almost 2x the brick increment...those are stronger entry and exit points.
"A dumb man never learns. A smart man learns from his own failure and success. But a wise man learns from the failure and success of others."
One thing I forgot to add is that the inherent nature of Renko is to remove the time aspect....so a bar might form in any time frame imagineable...might be 1 minute, 1 hour, 1 day, etc.
With regular time based bars, you see an "inversion" where the bar is an up bar, but instead of the normal OLHC order, you see an inversion order of OHLHC (which gets plotted as OLHC). This doesn't happen very often, but it does happen (because the time is limited, it's not as often). With Renko, there's no time limit, so price wonders however it wants, for as long as it wants before moving far enough to create a new bar.
This type of "inversion" bar really throws trailing stops and anything that's tick/tick or IOG for a loop, because unless the stop and profit limits are larger than the bar, the backtest engine either has to assume "best case" or "worst case" with respect to OHLC.
Obviously the remedy to this is to backtest "look inside" or tick/tick, but with TS, that's not always available. (IOG strategies, DLL strategies, etc).
"A dumb man never learns. A smart man learns from his own failure and success. But a wise man learns from the failure and success of others."
I can understand the points about wicks not showing, and I have now plotted a 5Range chart and 5 Renko chart together and can very clearly see some of the price action you are talking about.
However I still don't get the point above. If the Renko plots like you explain, surely you would see a gap from the bar that closed at 100.00 and the one which opened at 100.20.
If bar[1] is red (or a down bar) and the current bar closes up (green bar) yes, you see a void gap, but the open/close values do not account for this.
If you click on the green bar (that's preceded by a red) the open for the green bar is reported as the actual price of the bottom of the green bar (not the close of the red bar or the bottom of the red bar).
Historically, those values throw everything off.
When TS is plotting renkos in real time, they turn different colors when they're in "no man's land" i.e. the range of the bar preceding.
when a new bar reverses from previous, it doesn't take into account the close of the last bar as it's open. the open/close value for renko bricks is always a fixed preset amount.
"A dumb man never learns. A smart man learns from his own failure and success. But a wise man learns from the failure and success of others."
Ah I see, thanks a lot RM99 for your thorough reply. I haven't been able to locate examples of this '3x range occurrence', but did find in my data/instrument examples when the price when 1 tick higher or lower than the Renko bar, which with a box size of 2 would be half of the box range, which is already big and that's even with a "slow" instrument with low ATR. Thanks again for bringing up this important point RM99. I've attached a screenshot for other readers which show 2 of these cases (see red arrow).
MultiCharts currently can't plot the wicks of Renko bars (right?). At first thought I assumed this could be coded in a custom indicator, by plotting vertical lines which would be the wicks for the Renko bar, based on a lower resolution time frame. But, to accurately plot these wicks, they'd had to be matched with a 1 Tick resolution. However, that screws up the distance between the Renko bars (missing feature MultiCharts Project Management - Issue MC-377 - Keep X [AUTOLINK]Scale[/AUTOLINK] of Data1 when 'hidden' Data2 is in different time frame [Feature Request]). Perhaps someone knows a way how to keep the Renko bars usable when adding a 1 Tick data series as Data2? Then we can code an indicator which draws these custom wicks, which would be a great help to visually see the "quality" of the Renk chart and the chosen 'box size'-settings for a particular instrument.
//Work out session time SessionTime = CalcSessionTime;; TimeToTrade = CalcLondonOpen;
are? (Since I don't have those functions).
Hi Jura
Sorry for the delay in responding, but I have been in Switzerland all week for work and have just got back.
Those two functions are ones I developed. My data is in local PC time and as I switch around time zones (Australia and Singapore) I developed those functions to work out when the London Session opened according to my time zone (taking into account Day Light Saving) and when the FX Session Time started.
You can remove these functions and set them to whatever time you want.