Renko Bands

This is renko without the candles, just the endpoint plotted as a line with bands around it that represent the brick size. The idea came from thinking about what renko actually gives you once you strip away the visual brick format. At its core, renko is a filtered price series that only updates when price moves a fixed amount, which means it's inherently a trend-following mechanism with built-in noise reduction. By plotting just the renko price level and surrounding it with bands at the brick threshold distances, you get something that works like regular volatility bands while still behaving as a trend indicator.

The center line is the current renko price, which trails actual price based on whichever brick sizing method you've selected. When price moves enough to complete a brick in the renko calculation, the center line jumps to the new brick level. The bands sit at plus and minus one brick size from that center line, showing you exactly how far price needs to move before the next brick would form. This makes the bands function as dynamic breakout levels. When price touches or crosses a band, you know a new renko brick is forming and the trend calculation is updating.

What makes this cool is the dual-purpose nature. You can use it like traditional volatility bands where the outer edges represent boundaries of normal price movement, and breaks beyond those boundaries signal potential trend continuation or exhaustion. But because the underlying calculation is renko rather than standard deviation or ATR around a moving average, the bands also give you direct insight into trend state. When the center line is rising consistently and price stays near the upper band, you're in a clean uptrend. When it's falling and price hugs the lower band, downtrend. When the center line is flat and price is bouncing between both bands, you're ranging.

The three brick sizing methods work the same way as standard renko implementations. Traditional sizing uses a fixed price range, so your bands are always the same absolute distance from the center line. ATR-based sizing calculates brick range from historical volatility, which makes the bands expand and contract based on the ATR measurement you chose at startup. Percentage-based sizing scales the brick size with price level, so the bands naturally widen as price increases and narrow as it decreases. This automatic scaling is particularly useful for instruments that move proportionally rather than in fixed increments.

The visual simplicity compared to full renko bricks makes this more practical for overlay use on your main chart. Instead of trying to read brick patterns in a separate pane or cluttering your price chart with boxes and lines, you get a single smoothed line with two bands that convey the same information about trend state and momentum. The center line shows you the filtered trend direction, the bands show you the threshold levels, and the relationship between price and the bands tells you whether the current move has legs or is stalling out.

From a trend-following perspective, the renko line naturally stays flat during consolidation and only moves when directional momentum is strong enough to complete bricks. This built-in filter removes a lot of the whipsaw that affects moving averages during choppy periods. Traditional moving averages continue updating with every bar regardless of whether meaningful directional movement is happening, which leads to false signals when price is just oscillating. The renko line only responds to sustained moves that meet the brick size threshold, so it tends to stay quiet when price is going nowhere and only signals when something is actually happening.

The bands also serve as natural stop-loss or profit-target references since they represent the distance price needs to move before the trend calculation changes. If you're long and the renko line is rising, you might place stops below the lower band on the theory that if price falls far enough to reverse the renko trend, your thesis is probably invalidated. Conversely, the upper band can mark levels where you'd expect the current brick to complete and potentially see some consolidation or pullback before the next brick forms.

What this really highlights is that renko's value isn't just in the brick visualization, it's in the underlying filtering mechanism. By extracting that mechanism and presenting it in a more traditional band format, you get access to renko's trend-following properties without needing to commit to the brick chart aesthetic or deal with the complications of overlaying brick drawings on a time-based chart. It's renko after all, so you get the trend filtering and directional clarity that makes renko useful, but packaged in a way that integrates more naturally with standard technical analysis workflows.