Renko and range bars hide the one thing a scalper needs most: time

[Shadow Trader]

A Renko brick forms when price moves a fixed distance, regardless of how long that takes. Range bars work similarly. Both remove time from the picture and produce clean, trending-looking charts that make setups look obvious.

The cleanliness is partly an illusion. A five pip brick might form in four seconds or forty minutes, and the chart looks identical. Spread widening, news, rollover and dead periods are invisible. A signal that looks perfect might have formed while the market was frozen.

There's also the repainting question. Depending on how the platform builds the bricks from bid data, some versions redraw or shift when new ticks arrive, and a backtest on them can look far better than live results.

Fixed-distance bars do have uses. They filter noise in a very mechanical way, and some traders pair them with a clock to keep time in view.

Has a Renko or range chart ever produced better live results than the same idea on a time chart?