Mountain Frog Research

Sessions most like 2026-08-12, as of 11:30 ET

A morning that made its high on the opening bell and has been sliding under it on a thin tape.

What would separate them: Watch the opening high and the morning low as the edges of the question — the analogs that went somewhere either retook that high or broke that low outright, while those that went nowhere kept probing and failing at each edge without clearing it. Watch participation beside that: whether volume arrives with a push, or the tape stays as thin as it has been since the open.

What ties these sessions together is a high printed early and never bettered, then a morning spent working away from it into a recovery that ran out of steam. Today sits inside that shape, though at the heavier end of the volatility range and the lighter end of the participation range — turnover is running under what the wider history treats as normal for this much of the session. Its bounce off the low has not reached as far as most of the analogs had mustered by the same point, and the morning's balance is roomier than most of the cohort yet still tighter than a typical session, so the range on offer is modest against the daily ATR this market is carrying.

Lift that held 4 of 12

These repaired the morning slide after the cutoff and kept what they took, though some dipped to fresh lows before the lift took hold. The close stayed well above where the cutoff found them, up near the day's upper edge.

new high 3 new low 2 median to close +0.32 ATR
Went nowhere 3 of 12

These poked into fresh ground after the cutoff — fresh lows, with a fresh high in the mix — but nothing stuck, and each push got reclaimed about as fast as it printed. Excursions stayed cramped in each direction and price finished within a whisker of where it sat at the cutoff.

new high 1 new low 3 median to close +0.08 ATR
Flushed then repaired 2 of 12

These broke the morning low with a real push lower before doing anything else, then spent the remainder of the session climbing back out of it. The damage came first and the repair took the rest of the day, leaving the close near the cutoff.

new high 0 new low 2 median to close +0.12 ATR
Rallied then rolled 3 of 12

Each of these pushed higher first, clearing the morning high, before rolling over and handing the move back to finish below where price stood at the cutoff. The deepest of them kept going and closed on the session low.

new high 3 new low 2 median to close -0.27 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.

2026-08-12 — TODAY vwap -0.04· hi +0.03 @09:30 · IBgap +0.05· vwapΔ -0.12 · retr 33%/57%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
5 of 12 went both ways
after the cutoff, by which extremes they took
Room past the level
-0.36 ATR
median run from the cutoff price
Heat before it got there
+0.34 ATR
worst excursion against you between the cutoff and the extreme — not the whole session · worst +1.00 ATR
What would catch it off guard
7 did something else
4 expanded downward, 2 expanded upward, 1 stayed in balance · worst close +0.46 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
2026-08-12 — today0.0068.80.440.7533%57%in progress
2025-06-300.2247.50.330.6731%56%+0.32+0.61-0.26YESYES
2024-09-180.4559.20.310.5535%73%-0.27+1.00-0.36YESYES
2025-12-040.4687.00.370.9838%76%+0.13+0.17-0.23YES
2022-11-180.4770.20.510.9939%49%+0.08+0.21-0.36YES
2025-05-120.4886.80.441.0742%72%+0.46+0.48-0.10YES
2022-11-020.5171.80.280.8429%56%-1.09+0.86-1.10YESYES
2024-03-130.5139.20.370.9326%78%+0.01+0.34-0.38YESYES
2025-10-280.5250.00.410.6718%66%+0.30+0.69-0.14YESYES
2024-10-240.5845.50.330.7523%66%+0.12+0.28-0.46YES
2023-06-210.6338.00.491.0754%66%-0.11+0.45-0.19YES
2023-09-110.6644.00.480.8045%57%+0.28+0.32-0.12
2024-06-060.6834.50.320.8033%70%+0.04+0.07-0.54YES
cohort low34.50.280.5518%49%-1.09+0.07-1.10
cohort median50.00.370.8435%66%+0.12+0.45-0.26
cohort high87.00.511.0754%78%+0.46+1.00-0.10
cohort hit rate7/129/12
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.

2025-06-30 d=0.22 vwap -0.03· hi +0.01 @09:30 · IBgap +0.09· vwapΔ -0.10 · retr 31%/56%max closed +0.32 ATR
2024-09-18 d=0.45 vwap -0.03· hi +0.03 @09:30 · IBgap +0.09· vwapΔ -0.05 · retr 35%/73%max closed -0.27 ATR
2025-12-04 d=0.46 vwap -0.03· hi +0.01 @09:30 · IBgap +0.08· vwapΔ -0.14 · retr 38%/76%max closed +0.13 ATR
2022-11-18 d=0.47 vwap -0.01· hi +0.02 @09:30 · IBgap +0.02· vwapΔ -0.22 · retr 39%/49%max closed +0.08 ATR
2025-05-12 d=0.48 vwap -0.03· hi +0.03 @09:30 · IBgap -0.02· vwapΔ -0.12 · retr 42%/72%max closed +0.46 ATR
2022-11-02 d=0.51 vwap -0.02· hi +0.02 @09:30 · IBgap -0.05· vwapΔ -0.08 · retr 29%/56%max closed -1.09 ATR
2024-03-13 d=0.51 vwap -0.08· hi +0.00 @09:30 · IBgap +0.07· vwapΔ -0.13 · retr 26%/78%max closed +0.01 ATR
2025-10-28 d=0.52 vwap -0.09· hi +0.03 @09:30 · IBgap +0.06· vwapΔ -0.19 · retr 18%/66%max closed +0.30 ATR
2024-10-24 d=0.58 vwap -0.11· hi +0.02 @09:30 · IBgap -0.02· vwapΔ -0.05 · retr 23%/66%max closed +0.12 ATR
2023-06-21 d=0.63 vwap +0.04· hi +0.02 @09:30 · IBgap +0.06· vwapΔ -0.15 · retr 54%/66%max closed -0.11 ATR
2023-09-11 d=0.66 vwap -0.04· hi +0.12 @09:34 · IBgap +0.04· vwapΔ -0.26 · retr 45%/57%max closed +0.28 ATR
2024-06-06 d=0.68 vwap -0.10· hi +0.12 @09:44 · IBgap +0.03· vwapΔ -0.01 · retr 33%/70%max closed +0.04 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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