It doesn’t take a financial guru of profound genius to know that there has been a nasty correction around April and May every year since 2006.What is an investor or trader to do?The trader in you will say “sell in May and go away.”This is a solid option, but the trouble is timing the exit and the re-entry. This is hard or, according to theory, impossible. In practical terms it’s also hard work for those concerned and expensive if you have a fat portfolio.The correction of 2012 for instance was not really worth bothering about and the subsequent recovery was just terrific.As such you might have bailed out, saved little and then missed the massive rally up to the end of the year. This would have been a big loss of profits.The efficient market hypothesis, which no one believes even though with a time series and a spread sheet looks uncannily correct, says just buy, hold and ignore. In fact buy a tracker, cancel your subscription to the financial pages and come back when you are retired and rich.This is no fun and the stock market would stop working if people actually did do that, so what is a non-hibernating trader or investor to do? The answer is an exaggerated form of “buy the dips.”You might invest and trade all day and yearlong but, as we all know, money is made when the market moves and not during the bulk of time when nothing is happening.The trick of trading the summer spring correction is to keep your power dry around the time of the dip and then buy into the correction after it has happened. If it doesn’t happen there is no great harm done as the money can be used in short order once the correction window is passed.If the correction doesn’t happen, then it’s a case of buying what has become cheap.In a correction good companies are punished hard for disappointment in the opposite way as they are not punished to a great extent when the market is rallying.This leaves some exceptional opportunities to be had when companies disappoint during a correction, providing an investor with great entry opportunities.For the trader though there are lots of dead cat bounces and recoveries to be had and these opportunities tend to display the same behaviour across all similar situations due to the algorithmic trading of the modern era, where robots must dispose of big lines of stock with the same tranching engine churning the same algorithm to do the work.The trader therefore keeps his eye out for good companies that slump and, using recent history of similar stocks, can time the bounce.The right answer and the easiest answer to what to do in the summer slump is however to do nothing. Buy good stocks, hold them and sell them when they breach your rules or hit your targets and let the market get on with its random gyrations.You have to be an alien to do this though. Most people, perhaps all, buy stocks because they are fun and exciting. They love the game. It is no good playing by the book because whoever wrote the book was boring. You have to be engaged to play and if you aren’t you will miss all the potential upside all together.The real trick is to follow the summer slump as closely as you need, meaning you need to be in the market but no harder.While it is more profitable to be passive and theoretical about your investments it is simply not a practical tack because people need motivation and volatility to actually make them invest at all. It is the rallies and crashes that keep us interested and if you ignored the drama you would quickly find another outlet for your money.As we close in on a new era of equity trading it is good to be on tip toes because when the market does fly, after years of recession, most people won’t even know it had happened, whilst the active traders and investors will be coining it.If we do not get a major correction this year, the new era will have begun.