I spent a couple hours yesterday trying out a new technique for identifying chop. I think this one might actually work. Need to look at a lot more charts, but here’s an example:

The indicator describes whether recent action is up, chop, or down. I’ve highlighted the chop areas on the chart itself to help you see how to read it. I really do think this has potential to be the best chop indicator I’ve seen. Not sure exactly how useful it is, though, because most turning points are identified as choppy until it’s clear that we are actually headed in a new direction. This means, most of the “best” signals (which are near turning points) get filtered out. Maybe I can make it optimistically guess that turning points aren’t chop… a sort of innocent until proven guilty thing. This would mean that it would take longer for it to tell you about choppy areas… but it may be a good compromise.