Mountain Frog Research

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

A quiet morning that topped at the bell and has been leaking lower ever since.

What would separate them: What separates the camps is observable in real time: whether the next test of the morning low is absorbed and turned back or draws price down through it, and whether participation stays this light into the afternoon or picks up. The sessions that were bought back and the sessions that went quiet part company from the sessions that kept pressing on those points, not on anything visible before the cutoff.

These are mornings that made their high early and then spent the rest of the session giving ground, with each bounce failing beneath the last — drifting rather than driving, and mostly quieter than the record's usual. Today fits that pattern at its extreme: the high came right at the opening bar, the best bounce so far is thinner than most of the group managed by this hour, and turnover is running under even this subdued cohort, far below a typical day. Where today parts company is volatility — the daily range it is working with sits toward the wide end of the matched set and above the record's middle. What the group went on to do after the cutoff was not advertised by any of that.

Bought back hard 3 of 12

The break of the morning low barely travelled before it was taken back. Buyers worked the afternoon up through the damage, and these sessions finished well above where they sat at late morning, with the day's high set after the cutoff rather than at the open.

new high 3 new low 3 median to close +0.52 ATR
Kept pressing lower 4 of 12

For these, the morning slide was the day. Afternoon bounces died short of the high, the low kept extending after the cutoff, and the close landed in the lower part of the range.

new high 0 new low 4 median to close -0.37 ATR
Round trip 3 of 12

These covered real ground after the cutoff — a deep probe under the morning low, and in some cases a swing back up as well — and then handed the excursion back, finishing about where they had been at late morning. The travel was real; the net was not.

new high 0 new low 3 median to close +0.01 ATR
Went quiet 2 of 12

The morning drift simply stalled. Range contracted after the cutoff, the low was extended by a nudge rather than a push, and the close landed nearly on top of the late-morning price.

new high 0 new low 2 median to close +0.08 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.

2026-08-11 — TODAY vwap -0.15· hi +0.01 @09:30 · IBgap +0.11· vwapΔ -0.07 · retr 8%/27%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
9 of 12 expanded downward
after the cutoff, by which extremes they took
Room past the level
-0.49 ATR
median run from the cutoff price
Heat before it got there
+0.10 ATR
worst excursion against you between the cutoff and the extreme — not the whole session · worst +0.43 ATR · typically reached 14:05
What would catch it off guard
3 did something else
3 went both ways · worst close +0.76 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
2026-08-11 — today0.0068.80.300.648%27%in progress
2024-01-230.3636.20.280.7913%20%+0.52+0.58-0.05YESYES
2024-05-130.3949.00.330.656%24%+0.01+0.10-0.24YES
2022-12-190.5757.00.380.8520%34%-0.29+0.03-0.59YES
2025-04-140.57112.00.470.742%35%+0.04+0.36-0.42YES
2025-09-190.7240.50.360.816%32%+0.76+1.00-0.09YESYES
2022-10-100.8585.00.391.4322%39%-0.04+0.24-0.31YES
2023-06-160.8738.00.641.2717%32%-0.37+0.43-0.49YES
2024-08-280.9159.80.210.8519%24%+0.01+0.18-0.56YES
2025-06-300.9447.50.330.6731%56%+0.32+0.61-0.26YESYES
2023-09-010.9546.00.561.188%24%+0.08+0.10-0.26YES
2025-03-260.9794.80.400.9312%29%-0.39+0.05-0.55YES
2023-09-211.0031.80.621.308%28%-0.75+0.35-0.82YES
cohort low31.80.210.652%20%-0.75+0.03-0.82
cohort median49.00.390.8513%32%+0.01+0.35-0.31
cohort high112.00.641.4331%56%+0.76+1.00-0.05
cohort hit rate3/1212/12
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.

2024-01-23 d=0.36 vwap -0.16· hi +0.10 @09:31 · IBgap +0.09· vwapΔ -0.08 · retr 13%/20%max closed +0.52 ATR
2024-05-13 d=0.39 vwap -0.12· hi +0.03 @09:30 · IBgap +0.09· vwapΔ -0.16 · retr 6%/24%max closed +0.01 ATR
2022-12-19 d=0.57 vwap -0.15· hi +0.06 @09:30 · IBgap +0.19· vwapΔ -0.13 · retr 20%/34%max closed -0.29 ATR
2025-04-14 d=0.57 vwap -0.27· hi +0.03 @09:30 · IBgap +0.10· vwapΔ -0.13 · retr 2%/35%max closed +0.04 ATR
2025-09-19 d=0.72 vwap -0.24· hi +0.10 @09:51 · IBgap +0.08· vwapΔ -0.05 · retr 6%/32%max closed +0.76 ATR
2022-10-10 d=0.85 vwap -0.14· hi +0.03 @09:30 · IBgap +0.06· vwapΔ -0.25 · retr 22%/39%max closed -0.04 ATR
2023-06-16 d=0.87 vwap -0.23· hi +0.03 @09:30 · IBgap +0.17· vwapΔ -0.26 · retr 17%/32%max closed -0.37 ATR
2024-08-28 d=0.91 vwap -0.29· hi +0.08 @09:30 · IBgap +0.06· vwapΔ -0.23 · retr 19%/24%max closed +0.01 ATR
2025-06-30 d=0.94 vwap -0.03· hi +0.01 @09:30 · IBgap +0.09· vwapΔ -0.10 · retr 31%/56%max closed +0.32 ATR
2023-09-01 d=0.95 vwap -0.25· hi +0.10 @09:34 · IBgap +0.10· vwapΔ -0.28 · retr 8%/24%max closed +0.08 ATR
2025-03-26 d=0.97 vwap -0.17· hi +0.11 @09:40 · IBgap -0.07· vwapΔ -0.14 · retr 12%/29%max closed -0.39 ATR
2023-09-21 d=1.00 vwap -0.30· hi +0.09 @09:30 · IBgap +0.03· vwapΔ -0.25 · retr 8%/28%max closed -0.75 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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