Two things I had considered ADX or/and the slope of moving averages. However, i have absolutely no experience with technical indicators so any help is deeply appreciated. Thank you much for your time. FoN
Read the thread below and try google. You should find plenty of ideas but unfortunately the perfect answer / indicator stil doesn't exist ! http://www.elitetrader.com/vb/showthread.php?s=&threadid=48845
That's unfortunate since everything else I can find in price. Guess there really is no use for indicators then, not trying to start a battle, just an objective personal observation based on my criteria. FoN
Indicators can help you to interpret the price, especially with mechanical systems. Discretionary trading is a totally different beast and you should be able to spot chop without any indicator.
if you have to use an indicator if analysing 100's of markets at a time, then id go for bollinger bands given the underlying maths your trying to id is price moving < 1 sd. bb's can also be translated into an oscillator, meaning you can set an alert should a squeeze come about.
The thing you're looking is what all technical traders are looking for. So expecting to find it in the public domain is naive. Are all indicators useless? Maybe all the publicly disclosed ones are. But there are proprietary indicators that will consistently find trends and some of them may even be blackboxes for sale (e.g., Composite Fractal Behavior). So expand your search beyond the free stuff and you may find what you're looking for.
If you want something to give you a sense of market sentiment that is not that indicator I would try a Renko style chart on a daily setting with a box size of the 14 daily atr.