Should You Stop Trading From June to August?

Quieter, yes. Biased, no.

The claim as it is usually statedCut trading frequency from June to August - the whole summer is dead.

Movement genuinely drops in 12 of 19 markets across the whole summer, while only 1 of 19 shows a directional difference. The thinness is real and extends beyond August alone.

What the data shows

Across 19 markets: direction: not testable at this unit — this window comes round once a year, so the sample is 19 occurrences in the median market (5–24 across the nineteen), not the tens of thousands of hourly bars inside them · movement: genuinely quieter in 13 of 19. Median movement in the window, 86% of a normal hour.

Market	In the window	Rest	Difference	Movement	Years
ETH/USD	49.1%	50.1%	-1.0 pp	85% of normal	9
UK100 (FTSE)	50.3%	51.2%	-0.9 pp	80% of normal	5
Gold (XAU/USD)	50.5%	51.1%	-0.6 pp	84% of normal	24
GER40 (DAX)	51.0%	51.6%	-0.6 pp	86% of normal	13
BTC/USD	50.5%	51.1%	-0.6 pp	70% of normal	9
EUR/USD	49.6%	50.1%	-0.5 pp	92% of normal	24

No significance flag on a season, and here is why. This window comes round once a year. The tens of thousands of hourly bars inside it are not that many independent readings of it — the sample is 19 occurrences in the median market (5–24 across the nineteen). At that size nothing here can clear our bar: detecting the documented "sell in May" effect in EUR/USD would need about 41 years, and we hold 24. The percentages are real and worth reading as description; the column that would tell you they are proven is deliberately absent. What we will not publish →

Six largest differences, whichever way they point. There is no z column on a seasonal claim: it would be a significance flag on a window that recurs once a year, and this site does not print one.

Who says it

Daily Price Action

How this was measured

Every claim here reduces to a window on the clock or the calendar, so it can simply be checked. We compare the claimed window against the rest of the week on 23 years of hourly data across 19 markets, measuring two separate things the folklore tends to conflate: direction (does the window close higher more often?) via a two-proportion z-test, and movement (is the average move bigger or smaller?). A window can be perfectly ordinary in direction and genuinely quieter in movement — saying which is the entire point.

The bar here is |z| ≥ 2, deliberately more lenient than the |z| ≥ 3 this site applies to its own numbers: when testing someone else's claim, failing to reject it even at a lenient bar is the stronger statement.

Check any hour yourself →

Free on the four major pairs, with the full 23 years and the sample size on every number.