Mountain Frog Research

Sessions most like 2026-08-03, as of 11:30 ET

A trending morning that has kept what it took and is sitting on its high as the cutoff arrives.

What would separate them: The dividing line in this group is the level price is holding at the cutoff: the sessions that carried on never traded meaningfully back beneath it, while those that unwound traded through it and stayed under into the afternoon. With the high set moments before the cutoff, watch whether that level is defended or given up.

What binds these sessions is not the size of the morning range — the match selects for that — but how little of it came back. They were still holding most of the morning's move at the cutoff, where a typical session has given back far more by this hour. Today sits at the firm end on range, and at the top of the group for how much of the day's average the morning has already claimed; the pullback so far is middling inside this cohort, and slight only against the broader record. Participation is where today parts company: ordinary by the full-record standard, while most of these analogs were running lighter than usual.

Drive carried on 5 of 12

These pressed ahead after the cutoff and never traded meaningfully back. The afternoon dip barely dented the morning's work and the close came near the best of the session.

new high 5 new low 0 median to close +0.52 ATR
Chopped in place 4 of 12

These probed a little further at most, then rotated back through the cutoff level and worked either side of it for the rest of the day. Whatever the swings in between, price finished close to where the morning had already put it.

new high 4 new low 0 median to close +0.04 ATR
Morning unwound 3 of 12

Any push higher here came to nothing, and the afternoon was spent giving the morning back — closing well below where the drive had left price rather than near the high. The deepest of them broke through the session's earlier low.

new high 1 new low 1 median to close -0.40 ATR

Written from the computed figures only, by a model that is not permitted to write a number — every count above is rendered from the same data as the table. Camps are one reading of these sessions, not a forecast: the matched features have been measured to add nothing over price position alone, so a cohort rate at this sample size is descriptive.

2026-08-03 — TODAY vwap +0.27· hi +0.94 @11:24 · IBgap +0.22· vwapΔ +0.48 · retr 9%/11%max in progress
All twelve, and today, on one set of axes hover a line to isolate it · use the plot column in the table below to drop a session — the scale refits to what is left, so hiding an outlier gives the rest the whole frame
Faint left of the cutoff: those sessions were selected for resembling today there, so the agreement is by construction. Everything that matters is to the right. Outcome is in the geometry as well as the colour — a new high is a line clearing its own earlier high — because red and green are the hardest pair to tell apart with colour-blindness.
What these became
10 of 12 expanded upward
after the cutoff, by which extremes they took
Room past the level
+0.44 ATR
median run from the cutoff price · +0.39 ATR beyond the morning high itself
Heat before it got there
-0.08 ATR
worst excursion against you between the cutoff and the extreme — not the whole session · worst -0.47 ATR · typically reached 15:20
What would catch it off guard
2 did something else
1 stayed in balance, 1 expanded downward · worst close -1.05 ATR

What kind of session these became — expansion one way, both ways, or balance — on the same four-way split the corpus study uses, where balance is a third of all sessions. Deliberately not a hit rate: which extreme gets taken largely restates where price already sat at the cutoff, and nobody holds to the close anyway. How far it ran, what it cost to sit through, and when it got there are the parts a trade is built on. n=12.

plot sessiondistATRIB /ATRRVOL retr nowretr max to closemax upmax down new highnew low
2026-08-03 — today0.0066.80.861.019%11%in progress
2024-04-030.4335.00.860.885%6%-0.40+0.04-0.89
2025-04-020.6294.50.661.145%11%+0.13+0.44-0.26YES
2023-08-290.6244.00.831.012%6%+0.52+0.59-0.01YES
2023-01-230.6458.50.651.2323%24%-0.05+0.31-0.37YES
2022-10-280.6970.20.681.4316%18%+0.54+0.62-0.05YES
2025-02-040.7954.80.710.812%15%-0.05+0.06-0.47YES
2025-09-110.8540.50.670.914%24%+0.04+0.23-0.20YES
2023-07-180.9030.20.600.7918%19%+0.64+0.86-0.08YES
2026-01-120.9148.00.710.7911%13%+0.20+0.40-0.04YES
2023-10-100.9247.80.581.077%14%-0.40+0.18-0.45YES
2024-01-040.9932.00.650.8811%15%-1.05+0.05-1.14YES
2025-09-221.0140.50.480.6913%21%+0.46+0.58-0.12YES
cohort low30.20.480.692%6%-1.05+0.04-1.14
cohort median47.80.670.9111%15%+0.13+0.40-0.20
cohort high94.50.861.4323%24%+0.64+0.86-0.01
cohort hit rate10/121/12
CORPUS median (n=967)50.50.511.0034%60%+0.05+0.30-0.28
CORPUS base rate56%50%

All ATR-normalised and measured from the 11:30 cutoff. max up / max down are forward excursions after the cutoff — not the session extremes, which in most of these were already set. new high / new low ask whether the post-cutoff move exceeded the pre-cutoff extreme. Click any row to expand that session's chart to full width and jump to it; click again to collapse.

2024-04-03 d=0.43 vwap +0.34· hi +0.94 @11:22 · IBgap +0.28· vwapΔ +0.48 · retr 5%/6%max closed -0.40 ATR
2025-04-02 d=0.62 vwap +0.37· hi +0.94 @11:28 · IBgap +0.12· vwapΔ +0.44 · retr 5%/11%max closed +0.13 ATR
2023-08-29 d=0.62 vwap +0.39· hi +0.98 @11:26 · IBgap +0.27· vwapΔ +0.56 · retr 2%/6%max closed +0.52 ATR
2023-01-23 d=0.64 vwap +0.31· hi +0.93 @11:20 · IBgap +0.31· vwapΔ +0.49 · retr 23%/24%max closed -0.05 ATR
2022-10-28 d=0.69 vwap +0.27· hi +0.93 @11:11 · IBgap +0.16· vwapΔ +0.35 · retr 16%/18%max closed +0.54 ATR
2025-02-04 d=0.79 vwap +0.38· hi +0.78 @11:29 · IBgap +0.18· vwapΔ +0.40 · retr 2%/15%max closed -0.05 ATR
2025-09-11 d=0.85 vwap +0.41· hi +0.85 @11:18 · IBgap +0.18· vwapΔ +0.36 · retr 4%/24%max closed +0.04 ATR
2023-07-18 d=0.90 vwap +0.31· hi +0.74 @11:11 · IBgap +0.16· vwapΔ +0.38 · retr 18%/19%max closed +0.64 ATR
2026-01-12 d=0.91 vwap +0.23· hi +0.86 @11:16 · IBgap +0.06· vwapΔ +0.37 · retr 11%/13%max closed +0.20 ATR
2023-10-10 d=0.92 vwap +0.38· hi +0.78 @11:15 · IBgap +0.27· vwapΔ +0.34 · retr 7%/14%max closed -0.40 ATR
2024-01-04 d=0.99 vwap +0.35· hi +0.84 @11:16 · IBgap +0.11· vwapΔ +0.29 · retr 11%/15%max closed -1.05 ATR
2025-09-22 d=1.01 vwap +0.28· hi +0.78 @11:01 · IBgap +0.20· vwapΔ +0.32 · retr 13%/21%max closed +0.46 ATR

How these were matched

Matched on seven measures, all ATR-normalised and z-scored: distance from VWAP, magnitude of the high off the open, the clock time of that high, expansion of the price-VWAP gap across IB creation, how far VWAP itself was dragged, and how much of the drive has been retraced — both currently and at its deepest. The IB-gap and VWAP terms separate a day that trended from one that chopped to the same place; the retracement terms separate a day still pinned near its high from one that has round-tripped to the open. Ordered nearest first. Solid = up to 11:30, the part matched on. Faded = the rest of the day, the part to read. Shaded band left of the 09:30 marker is premarket from 06:00 ET. The y-axis is a shared ATR ruler with the session open at 0, identical on every tile, so magnitudes are directly comparable.

n=12. This is a case-inspection tool for rare behaviour — sort the tiles into camps by eye. It is not an inference tool, and a percentage taken off this many charts would not mean anything.

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