I've installed several EAs that draw Renko charts on MT5.
I've noticed the charts they draw aren't exactly the same. Likely that's because some use tickdata and others use M1 (or M5).
But what's more troubling is the speed of drawing the bricks.

Sometimes I see bricks being drawn one at the time as it should be. Then when I expect a new brick nothing happens. Then suddenly 3 bricks are drawn. The lagging of "brick drawing" varies per EA I've tested (Santa Renko, Essential Renko and RenkoChart EA)
My PC is fast and MT5 has minimal effect on the CPU load. Plenty of memory. So that's not the issue.
It's especially noticeable on gold and silver with smaller brick sizes

Just badly coded? Or a technical limitation of MT5?
From the messages from the EA's they work on the regular candlestick chart open a new chart and send data to that chart.
Is the transmitting of data constant or does MT5 by design only transmits only once a few seconds?

There are also Renko charts that are plotted as a regular indicator on the candlestick chart. While those might not have the delay, they are useless for my purpose because they don't support adding indicators. (Many indicators don't have the "use first indicator data" option)


That's a lengthy explanation, but my question is; "Can Renko charts be lag-free on MT5?"

CleanCharts wrote: Thu Oct 30, 2025 10:30 pm I've installed several EAs that draw Renko charts on MT5.

I don't know about MT5 specifically but there are inherent problems with price charts in general and MT4 offline charts.

Brokers always add the disclaimer 'prices are indicative' meaning that they are the individual broker's prices taken from the prices that are available to them at any given time and which may be the prices taken from an exchange or from a liquidity provider (usually a big bank or institution such as a pension fund).

So a broker's prices will never be the same as another broker one second to the next though they should be similar.
And offline charts modify the data a second time (see below) so different Renko EAs might not match exactly either.

Also, prices do not always move in a smooth sequential path, a large order might take out several price levels at once and so there can be large or small price gaps where a large candle is printed instantly or several Renko bars are printed instantly.

MT4 Offline charts use modified data from the base time chart, which, as above, also uses modified data.

Mladen has discussed issues of bugs within the MT4 platform's offline charts that were never addressed by Metaquotes, I don't know if these were carried over from MT4 to MT5.

I haven't found where those original Mladen posts are but I did respond to some similar queries and I'll copy here.

Not sure if this, even in part, is helpful, apologies if not.


'as mladen explains it there is a problem with all mt4 offline charts caused by the core code that metaquotes are aware of but never fixed.

So with a renko chart on start up or reset the bricks 'tidy themselves up', it's not a major repaint and does not happen on a live run but if you take a pic of a period of tight ranging price action and then go to the renko ea on the one minute chart and highlight a input value and press 'ok' back on the renko chart there will be a slight rearrangement of the bricks that makes it look cleaner than it was.'

So, there are discrepancies between broker's prices, discrepancies between MT4 time charts and offline charts, and discrepancies between different Renko EA coding.

I use Renko charts myself and I just roll with it. It is what it is.

Your choice of Broker and their data feed showing their price availability is probably the most important issue.