Mountain Frog Research

Sessions most like 2026-08-04, as of 11:30 ET

A morning that drove off the open and has surrendered almost nothing of it into the cutoff.

What would separate them: The distinguishing thing is what happens to the high set into the cutoff — whether it is taken and held, or rejected and left standing as the session high. From there, watch whether a pullback deeper than anything this morning has produced finds buyers, and whether afternoon participation holds up or drains away.

What binds this cohort is not the size of the morning move but how cleanly it was held — each of these sessions came into the cutoff pressing near its high, with pullbacks shallower than a typical session has shown by that hour. Today sits mid-pack on how far it has pulled back from the high, though its deepest pullback of the morning has been tighter than most of the group, and the high was set in the minutes just before the cutoff rather than earlier in the morning. Today's range regime is wider than most of the cohort and wider than the typical session in the corpus, while participation is running only modestly above normal. Where these sessions differ is entirely in what came after the cutoff.

Resumed the drive 4 of 12

These pressed straight on from the cutoff and never looked back, extending the morning high through the afternoon and closing near the top of that extension. Downside from the cutoff barely registered.

new high 4 new low 0 median to close +0.54 ATR
Extended, gave back 2 of 12

These pushed well past the morning high before sellers took a meaningful bite out of the extension. They still finished above where they stood at the cutoff, but well off the afternoon high.

new high 2 new low 0 median to close +0.37 ATR
Stalled and drifted 2 of 12

Movement in either direction stayed small once the cutoff passed. The morning high was nudged rather than built on, and the close landed near where the session already sat.

new high 2 new low 0 median to close +0.04 ATR
Faded, then recovered 2 of 12

The morning high was extended only marginally before the afternoon traded down through a meaningful slice of the morning gain. Buyers restored most of that late, leaving the close near where the cutoff found it.

new high 2 new low 0 median to close -0.05 ATR
Rolled over 2 of 12

The cutoff high stood as the session high and price worked steadily lower for the rest of the day, closing well below where the cutoff left them. The heavier case gave up the entire morning advance and made a fresh session low on the way down.

new high 0 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.

2026-08-04 — TODAY vwap +0.46· hi +1.10 @11:25 · IBgap +0.14· vwapΔ +0.45 · retr 7%/8%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
+0.52 ATR
median run from the cutoff price · +0.43 ATR beyond the morning high itself
Heat before it got there
-0.06 ATR
worst excursion against you between the cutoff and the extreme — not the whole session · worst -0.47 ATR · typically reached 15:15
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
2026-08-04 — today0.0067.00.751.107%8%in progress
2026-02-090.5756.50.820.882%8%-0.14+0.22-0.20YES
2025-04-020.6294.50.661.145%11%+0.13+0.44-0.26YES
2026-05-140.8255.50.510.886%7%-0.07+0.18-0.41YES
2026-02-060.8456.51.011.4710%18%+0.63+0.93-0.04YES
2023-08-290.8644.00.831.012%6%+0.52+0.59-0.01YES
2024-02-020.9236.50.581.228%34%+0.37+0.87-0.20YES
2024-04-030.9635.00.860.885%6%-0.40+0.04-0.89
2026-08-030.9766.80.861.019%11%+0.38+0.52-0.01YES
2025-09-110.9940.50.670.914%24%+0.04+0.23-0.20YES
2022-10-281.0970.20.681.4316%18%+0.54+0.62-0.05YES
2024-01-041.1432.00.650.8811%15%-1.05+0.05-1.14YES
2025-02-041.1454.80.710.812%15%-0.05+0.06-0.47YES
cohort low32.00.510.812%6%-1.05+0.04-1.14
cohort median55.50.711.016%15%+0.13+0.44-0.20
cohort high94.51.011.4716%34%+0.63+0.93-0.01
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.

2026-02-09 d=0.57 vwap +0.51· hi +0.95 @11:28 · IBgap +0.09· vwapΔ +0.46 · retr 2%/8%max closed -0.14 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
2026-05-14 d=0.82 vwap +0.43· hi +0.94 @11:28 · IBgap +0.04· vwapΔ +0.33 · retr 6%/7%max closed -0.07 ATR
2026-02-06 d=0.84 vwap +0.35· hi +1.12 @11:22 · IBgap -0.01· vwapΔ +0.46 · retr 10%/18%max closed +0.63 ATR
2023-08-29 d=0.86 vwap +0.39· hi +0.98 @11:26 · IBgap +0.27· vwapΔ +0.56 · retr 2%/6%max closed +0.52 ATR
2024-02-02 d=0.92 vwap +0.56· hi +0.98 @11:29 · IBgap +0.19· vwapΔ +0.33 · retr 8%/34%max closed +0.37 ATR
2024-04-03 d=0.96 vwap +0.34· hi +0.94 @11:22 · IBgap +0.28· vwapΔ +0.48 · retr 5%/6%max closed -0.40 ATR
2026-08-03 d=0.97 vwap +0.27· hi +0.94 @11:24 · IBgap +0.22· vwapΔ +0.48 · retr 9%/11%max closed +0.38 ATR
2025-09-11 d=0.99 vwap +0.41· hi +0.85 @11:18 · IBgap +0.18· vwapΔ +0.36 · retr 4%/24%max closed +0.04 ATR
2022-10-28 d=1.09 vwap +0.27· hi +0.93 @11:11 · IBgap +0.16· vwapΔ +0.35 · retr 16%/18%max closed +0.54 ATR
2024-01-04 d=1.14 vwap +0.35· hi +0.84 @11:16 · IBgap +0.11· vwapΔ +0.29 · retr 11%/15%max closed -1.05 ATR
2025-02-04 d=1.14 vwap +0.38· hi +0.78 @11:29 · IBgap +0.18· vwapΔ +0.40 · retr 2%/15%max closed -0.05 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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