Mountain Frog Research

Sessions most like 2026-08-05, as of 11:30 ET

A morning that made its high in the opening minutes and has been leaking away from it since, beneath the volume-weighted average and on heavier trade than usual.

What would separate them: Watch how the next push under the morning low trades — whether it draws fresh supply and keeps going, or is bought straight back with a rejection tail. Watch too whether trade stays heavy into the early afternoon or thins out, and whether the faded bounce can reclaim the volume-weighted average.

These are sessions that topped early, gave the opening push back, and came to the cutoff sitting closer to the low of the day than the high, with whatever bounce they had already fading. The match selected them on that shape, so the shape is not the interesting part — what separates them is what the afternoon did with it. Today's daily range gauge sits toward the wide end of the group, yet its initial balance is tighter than the group's and tighter than a normal session's, so the give-back has come from steady drift rather than an opening flush. Participation is running above the corpus norm, and today's best bounce reached further than any in the cohort had by this point — but most of it has been given back, leaving what it still holds about typical for the group.

Bought back up 3 of 12

The dip under the cutoff low was bought back in full, and from that point the buyer had the rest of the day. Each finished above where price stood at the cutoff, the strongest of them running a long way up.

new high 1 new low 3 median to close +0.44 ATR
Kept selling 3 of 12

These carried on the way the morning was pointing: the cutoff low gave way, bounces died quickly, and the close landed below where the day sat when the match was taken.

new high 0 new low 3 median to close -0.49 ATR
Flushed and repaired 2 of 12

Price broke down hard after the cutoff — the deepest give-ups in the group outside the trending seller — and then the low held and was bought back steadily, so the close came in level with the cutoff. On the chart they read as a washout followed by a slow grind back, not a trend.

new high 0 new low 2 median to close -0.00 ATR
Drifted in place 4 of 12

The afternoon added little in either direction; where a leg did develop it was downward and it was retraced, leaving the close within a whisker of the cutoff. Range stayed compressed relative to the morning that produced it.

new high 0 new low 4 median to close +0.02 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.

2026-08-05 — TODAY vwap -0.44· hi +0.15 @09:39 · IBgap -0.18· vwapΔ -0.18 · retr 16%/46%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
11 of 12 expanded downward
after the cutoff, by which extremes they took
Room past the level
-0.48 ATR
median run from the cutoff price
Heat before it got there
+0.15 ATR
worst excursion against you between the cutoff and the extreme — not the whole session · worst +0.55 ATR · typically reached 13:40
What would catch it off guard
1 did something else
1 went both ways · worst close +0.69 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
2026-08-05 — today0.0068.80.371.2016%46%in progress
2025-01-140.6465.20.481.1716%44%+0.22+0.48-0.39YES
2025-10-220.6650.50.541.286%44%-0.00+0.39-0.92YES
2025-07-310.7639.20.601.1725%29%-1.08+0.55-1.41YES
2026-07-080.7875.80.300.9411%22%+0.69+0.82-0.06YESYES
2023-10-130.7948.50.481.4715%16%-0.12+0.26-0.48YES
2023-09-260.8234.00.851.142%23%-0.28+0.35-0.53YES
2024-08-220.8659.80.460.783%15%-0.49+0.15-0.69YES
2024-08-260.8859.80.410.8216%39%+0.03+0.18-0.27YES
2025-10-070.8846.50.391.0212%42%-0.03+0.05-0.35YES
2024-07-300.8950.20.511.3618%28%-0.04+0.32-0.73YES
2024-04-010.9136.80.430.8829%30%+0.02+0.20-0.31YES
2023-05-310.9238.00.741.46-0%23%+0.44+0.76-0.01YES
cohort low34.00.300.78-0%15%-1.08+0.05-1.41
cohort median50.20.481.1715%29%-0.00+0.35-0.39
cohort high75.80.851.4729%44%+0.69+0.82-0.01
cohort hit rate1/1212/12
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.

2025-01-14 d=0.64 vwap -0.31· hi +0.11 @09:42 · IBgap -0.10· vwapΔ -0.15 · retr 16%/44%max closed +0.22 ATR
2025-10-22 d=0.66 vwap -0.41· hi +0.00 @09:30 · IBgap -0.20· vwapΔ -0.26 · retr 6%/44%max closed -0.00 ATR
2025-07-31 d=0.76 vwap -0.48· hi +0.11 @09:58 · IBgap -0.10· vwapΔ -0.21 · retr 25%/29%max closed -1.08 ATR
2026-07-08 d=0.78 vwap -0.38· hi +0.23 @09:46 · IBgap -0.13· vwapΔ -0.08 · retr 11%/22%max closed +0.69 ATR
2023-10-13 d=0.79 vwap -0.45· hi +0.26 @09:41 · IBgap -0.17· vwapΔ -0.27 · retr 15%/16%max closed -0.12 ATR
2023-09-26 d=0.82 vwap -0.43· hi +0.23 @09:44 · IBgap -0.23· vwapΔ -0.30 · retr 2%/23%max closed -0.28 ATR
2024-08-22 d=0.86 vwap -0.36· hi +0.11 @09:45 · IBgap -0.16· vwapΔ -0.26 · retr 3%/15%max closed -0.49 ATR
2024-08-26 d=0.88 vwap -0.23· hi +0.13 @09:33 · IBgap -0.20· vwapΔ -0.25 · retr 16%/39%max closed +0.03 ATR
2025-10-07 d=0.88 vwap -0.38· hi +0.10 @09:34 · IBgap -0.28· vwapΔ -0.36 · retr 12%/42%max closed -0.03 ATR
2024-07-30 d=0.89 vwap -0.48· hi +0.22 @09:42 · IBgap -0.20· vwapΔ -0.39 · retr 18%/28%max closed -0.04 ATR
2024-04-01 d=0.91 vwap -0.29· hi +0.15 @09:45 · IBgap -0.28· vwapΔ -0.18 · retr 29%/30%max closed +0.02 ATR
2023-05-31 d=0.92 vwap -0.32· hi +0.26 @09:45 · IBgap -0.23· vwapΔ -0.26 · retr -0%/23%max closed +0.44 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.

Charts rendered with Lightweight Charts™, Copyright © 2026 TradingView, Inc. (Apache-2.0).