Renko Bricks Closing on Time Not Price: The NinjaTrader Fix

You open your NinjaTrader 8 Renko chart Monday morning and the gap from Friday's close prints as one oversized, undefined bar that throws off every level you were watching. Or during a slow overnight session, a brick sits open well after price already covered your brick size, then suddenly snaps closed the moment the next minute rolls over.

The natural assumption is that a Renko chart, by definition, only closes a brick when price has moved far enough. On NinjaTrader that assumption does not always hold.

Why renko bricks closing on time not price happens on NinjaTrader

Most Renko implementations on the platform are still built on top of an underlying time-based bar series, commonly a one-minute or one-tick bar feeding the brick logic underneath. The brick looks like Renko, but its actual close point can be nudged by however often that underlying series updates. A brick that should close the instant price travels the distance you set can instead wait for the next time-based bar to arrive, or a gap can get absorbed into a single coarse bar because the underlying series never had a chance to sample it properly.

The real issue is not your brick size or reversal setting. It is whether the bar type is reading real trade prices, or reading a proxy for them.

What Renko Bar Type does

Renko Bar Type is a custom NinjaTrader 8 Bar Type that builds every brick directly from the tick feed. Each brick is opened, grown and closed purely from real trade prices arriving through the platform's tick data, with no time-based construction anywhere in the logic. A brick only closes because price traveled far enough, never because a clock ran out, on any instrument and any session.

Three inputs shape the series:

• Brick Size (in ticks): how far price must travel to close a brick in the current direction.
• Reversal Multiplier: how far price must travel against the current direction before the series flips. The brick that flips still closes exactly one Brick Size from the prior close, the reversal distance is only the trigger.
• Gap Wick (in ticks): a small fixed wick used only on bricks generated to fill a session gap, since there is no real tick data inside a gap to measure a true high or low.

On every normal brick, the high and low come from the actual tick range traded while that brick was forming. The currently forming brick is always visible on the chart and grows tick by tick, so you are never staring at a frozen bar waiting for time to pass.

Using it in a real session

Picture a futures trader following the E-mini overnight session into the US open. On a time-based Renko approximation, the pre-market chop can either flood the chart with bricks that do not reflect real movement, or delay a genuine break until the underlying bar catches up. With Renko Bar Type, the same session prints bricks strictly on price: quiet stretches produce fewer bricks, and a fast break through a level closes a brick the moment the tick feed confirms it.

When the weekend gap hits Sunday evening, the reopening is closed using the same brick-by-brick logic used intraday. If the gap spans several Brick Sizes, several bricks print from that single reopening, each carrying the fixed Gap Wick, instead of one oversized bar that hides what actually happened at the open.

One detail matters for backtesting: accurate historical bricks require tick data or Tick Replay enabled on the data series. Without it, historical bricks are reconstructed from the underlying bar's close price only, which is coarser, with flatter wicks and the possibility of missed intrabar bricks. Real-time bricks are always built from genuine ticks regardless of this setting.

Who this fits

• Traders who already trade Renko-style charts and want brick formation with zero time-based influence, not an approximation layered on top of a time series.
• Futures and forex intraday traders who want session gaps handled consistently instead of showing up as one oversized bar.
• Anyone stacking their own indicators or strategies on top of a Renko-style series who needs the brick construction itself to be transparent and predictable.

What it does not do

Renko Bar Type changes how price is displayed. It does not generate buy or sell signals, it does not predict direction, and it does not tell you where to enter or exit. It is a Bar Type, not a strategy.

It also will not give you fully accurate historical bricks unless tick data or Tick Replay is enabled for that data series, so if your NinjaTrader setup only pulls minute bars historically, expect coarser bricks further back on the chart. It is built for NinjaTrader 8 specifically and does not apply to other platforms. And because it removes time from the equation entirely, a very illiquid instrument with sparse ticks can still produce bricks that take a long time to close, simply because price genuinely has not moved, which is accurate behavior but can feel slow if you are used to time-based charts filling in regardless.

Pairing it with other tools

Because the brick construction is transparent and driven only by real price, it works as a clean base for overlays that also read price rather than time. S&R Pro NT8 marks confirmed swing highs and lows with liquidity lines, and HalfTrend Pro NT8 tracks a directional state from structural breaks. Both are price-based tools you can add on top of a Renko-style series if you already use that kind of structure or trend analysis, neither is required to use Renko Bar Type, and adding either does not change what the Bar Type itself does.

Before you switch your chart

Trading involves risk. Changing how price is displayed does not change the risk of trading, and nothing in this article is investment advice. Trade with your own plan and position sizing.

Renko Bar Type NT8 is free to add to your NinjaTrader 8 setup. If your Renko chart currently feels like it is reacting to a clock instead of price, look up Renko Bar Type NT8 on the ZynAlgo marketplace and see how your own instrument and session print with brick construction driven strictly by ticks.