How to Trade the Market During the Summer When You Don't Trust the Price Action

 By David S. Adams

There are few times during the year when trading is more frustrating than the summertime. The price action tends to be clipped and erratic and I generally lose any confidence that a move will follow through in a normal fashion. In short, traders tend to lose confidence in what are normally "automatic" setups because the market has trouble maintaining a consistent order flow in any direction. This loss of confidence in the market can make e-mini scalping a tenuous and exasperating time to trade.

To trade the summertime takes a change in your approach to trading; you need to become more selective in your trade choices and make a conscious attempt at scaling back the risk factor in each of your trades. In my experience, the market tends to slowly drift either long or short and then may spike one way or the other and then resume the slow drift. These are hardly optimal conditions for an e-mini scalper to trade, but with some forethought, you can make the best of the situation and post decent gains. Of course, my expectations for trading gains are lowered because of the adverse price action, but every now and then a highly profitable day can be had. In short, I tend to lose confidence that the market will show any follow-through on trades that can often be counted on to run in one direction.

Here are some of the techniques I employ while trading during the summer doldrums:

� Scale back your earning expectations so you aren't tempted to take lower probability trades which stand a higher chance of failure because of the erratic price action that often is part of summer trading. More to the point, I haven't hit many home runs during the summer months, but collecting a number of singles can be an effective trading technique.

� Scale back the number of contracts in your trading. This will help should you encounter some unexpected erratic price movement. Conservation of your trading capital should be more of a concern than high earnings.

� It is very difficult to find a trade that will run during the summer months, so you may want to take profits earlier than you might normally take. When you find yourself in profit be careful to manage the trade carefully and don't let the price backtrack and erase the profit.

� As I said earlier in this article, the price action tends to slow in velocity and the market tends to slowly drift higher or lower. Don't get caught in a drifting market on the wrong side of the trade. Exit a trade that slowly but surely moves against you to conserve capital. These slow drifts can last for quite some time and gradually take you right into your stop loss. Even the simplest trade can take 3 or 4 times longer to complete because of low volume. (If it is a low volume day)

I can't say that summer trading is a load of fun, but with some changes in your trading methodology and scaled back earnings expectations it can still be a moderately profitable time to trade.

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