I gotta line my own pockets but I do make a conscious effort to trade less out of spite for the merc. Black boxes and 990 just scratch trades back and fourth at every half and even.
To make money in chop, you have to be "thinking and trading" for chop.... quick to fade dips and rallies + take profits. Sometimes you can capture nice cumulative days. Of course other times you'll feel like you're hosing yourself, so why bother. But if the markets are choppy and you're thinking "move" instead of chop, then you've got no chance at all.
Agreed, buy when it looks like a crash and sell when it looks it's best. Just increases the stress level by 100% but tha'ts wha tyou gotta do.
To be honest, one of the great allures of the Eminis in the past was the predictability of the chop. By that I mean, you can rely on certain times of day having a particular profile. Support and resistance levels held better, you could get a better sense of the tape and where or when they might reverse it. Have a better feel for when it might be a stop run and/or not explode parabolically in one direction. I believe as electronic trading has taken over to a larger extent, the profile of the markets has been forever changed. There are just certain manners in which bigger money can engineer the markets temporarily that could not have been done with such frequency with a pit traded contract. So, in short, my response is that I see what you are saying because nowadays the odds that a meaningless chop session can turn into a parabolic one way move are much higher.