Once or twice a week I think. Every Thursday is storage report day, so it's usually choppy. Currently NG often makes decent moves several hours before regular market session (9:30 am NY). When market decides to become choppy, it can do it even during the regular session.
Small range is ok to me as my SL is also smaller. Targeting 15-25 ticks of scalping per trade is still doable in current NG market. Choppy move doesn't necessarily be defined as a chaotic move. During choppy days, I can see major market players feel comfortable taking stops in either sides using all sort of tricks (sometimes predictable common traps). I think when they haven't decided the direction, they kill time playing this game. Traders who can make money from choppy market should be counter trend traders fading the breakouts. IMHO, once a big move starts, they suffer huge loss and remove all the small profits they made before.
oops! I analyzed the wrong chart. me bad. updated copy ave day range 4% which is good 24 May - small range. not tradable for me 25 May - big range day. there were 2 opportunities to short it during the mid-Eur session, & early US session (NG inventory news?) 26 May - high chance NG will not move much My typical max stop loss is 12 to 15 ticks.
Big players with super deep packet can do whatever they want. If they want to make traps, there's no way we small players can avoid it. That's fine, they cannot do this forever. Once they reveal they intention and a major move starts finally, if we can move quick enough, we can recoup our small losses before and finish the day in black. However, choppy market gives quite a significant stress and damage our mentality anyway.
I mostly day trade futures using intermarket correlations to cut down false signals and improve the success rate. eg for trading Nymex crude oil, I also check the Shanghai INE crude oil. Some traders even correlate with ICE Europe crude oil. When I traded NYMEX NG last winter, I didn't use Intermarket correlations as I was already trading quite a few futures. Anyway, you might want to consider correlating NYMEX NG with say ICE Europe Dutch NG.
If you recognize retail can't significantly move markets and most of the time they're range bound until a strong trending move occasionally occurs...why not assume most of the action will be choppy until proven otherwise? Price moves to liquidity. Do what big money does. Strong moves get second legs which tend to become traps. Watch what limit order "traders" are doing. If money is being made on stop entries in both directions (1:1), a strong trend likely isn't present.
I never correlate markets, not saying it doesn't work, but I don't need confirmation being am trading off charts.
Choppy markets occur definitely on lower volumes, especially on holidays as example or times without important news. You can expect larger trends on important news when volatility increases a lot. Or at midday when traders are having their lunch there are more choppy moves than at NYSE open or last hour of stocks trading. When there are important earnings releases of higher market caps after hours you can also expect stronger moves and non-choppy markets here. Or month-end rebalancing also has an effect and can cause larger moves trought different asset classes. In addition in summer when there is a lot of holiday vacation the chances of more choppy moves are higher because of the lower volume. Or also after Christmas on last week of the year and then for the first week for the new year, because many market participants are still not on trading desk (to cause more market moves, so those moves are missing thus creating more choppy markets). That way you can calculate a bit beforehand when the chances of choppy markets are higher or less. I hope this helps you.