As at other times of the year, prices tend, overall, to rise when buying pressure exceeds selling pressure, and vice-versa. "Summer" is a geographically-dependent phenomenon: in many parts of the world, it's winter at the moment. Nevertheless, the overwhelming majority of trading volumes transacted relate to the Northern hemisphere, so the reduced trading volumes of July/August (more so August than July) are fairly reliable. The extent to which this affects one's trading varies greatly according to the type of trading one does (indeed, more greatly than many people appreciate, IMO: doing fast-moving, intraday futures trading, or "semi-scalping" as some people call it, I typically get fewer trading opportunities in July and August than in most other months, but the overall difference is less than many would expect ... I don't begin to share the quite widely-held perception that "you might as well not bother at all in August because there's no volume worth talking about", but I suspect that some of the subsequent replies to your question may well say something similar!)
1) Depends on which market you're talking about. 2) Just use Google and look up "Market Summer Doldrums". 3) Just pull up historical charts (past 10 years) of the summer (july/agugust) concerning the markets that you trade. If you're a day trader...obviously you'll need access to historical charts involving intraday data via the market that you trade. In fact, you can do that for any other month you're curious about or just look for websites that have statistical analysis of each month of the year via "seasonals" or "cycles" data. I've met profitable traders that only trade the summer months and other profitable traders that only trade other months and some profitable traders that only trade traditional winter months... Once again, depends on the market and/or country the trader resides. wrbtrader
You shouldn't. You should learn how to trade it. True, some of it is nearly untradable chop... but most is not. "Sideways", properly traded, often offers large opportunity for profit. Rather than considering "net movement over a time period", you should consider the sum of "tradable swings", both directions. Sideways often offers much greater trading opportunity than "relentless up-trend".