Mountain Frog Research

Sessions most like 2026-08-13, as of 11:30 ET

A mid-morning high, largely handed back, on a tape running thinner than usual.

What would separate them: The morning low is the visible fork: sessions that resumed higher lifted away without needing to retest it, while those that kept selling traded through it and could not reclaim it afterward. Worth watching alongside that is where the volume shows up — on the probe lower or on the recovery — and whether the afternoon's initial push away from VWAP is accepted or immediately faded.

What these sessions share is shape rather than size: the high arrived early, and by the cutoff a good part of the morning excursion had been given back, leaving price under VWAP instead of pressing the extreme. Today is further unwound at this hour than a typical morning in the corpus, and it sits toward the more-unwound end of its own matches. Where it clearly steps outside the group is participation — volume is running under the corpus norm and lighter than most of these analogs, which were busier sessions than this. The volatility backdrop is wider than the corpus median, so the same proportional give-back covers more ground in points than an ordinary day would.

Resumed the drive 5 of 12

These turned back up out of the retrace without conceding much further ground, cleared the morning high, and finished toward the strong end of the day. The give-back proved to be a pause in the move, not the end of it.

new high 5 new low 0 median to close +0.49 ATR
Kept selling 4 of 12

The unwinding simply carried on: price worked lower through the afternoon into a fresh session low and closed well below where the cutoff found it. Attempts higher never got back much above the cutoff level.

new high 0 new low 4 median to close -0.67 ATR
Held the range 2 of 12

Neither the morning high nor the morning low gave way. Price rotated back toward the middle and closed close to where the cutoff found it, with no sustained push in either direction.

new high 0 new low 0 median to close +0.29 ATR
Flushed then reclaimed 1 of 12

This session broke the morning low, found buyers underneath it, and reversed hard enough to take out the morning high before the close. It made the widest round trip in the group and still finished up on the day.

new high 1 new low 1 median to close +0.71 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.

2026-08-13 — TODAY vwap -0.18· hi +0.66 @10:35 · IBgap +0.20· vwapΔ +0.39 · retr 72%/77%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 expanded upward
after the cutoff, by which extremes they took
Room past the level
+0.57 ATR
median run from the cutoff price · +0.26 ATR beyond the morning high itself
Heat before it got there
-0.09 ATR
worst excursion against you between the cutoff and the extreme — not the whole session · worst -0.24 ATR · typically reached 15:55
What would catch it off guard
7 did something else
4 expanded downward, 2 stayed in balance, 1 went both ways · worst close -0.93 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
2026-08-13 — today0.0068.80.750.8972%77%in progress
2024-10-250.6445.00.680.8166%73%-0.78+0.06-1.01YES
2023-08-110.6934.80.981.0977%83%+0.29+0.48-0.08
2026-01-060.8651.00.620.9562%88%+0.55+0.65-0.09YES
2025-10-150.8850.50.841.1075%77%-0.51+0.03-1.77YES
2025-06-230.8953.00.900.6757%59%+0.71+0.80-0.87YESYES
2025-02-120.9048.80.791.1566%78%+0.57+0.82-0.01YES
2025-08-140.9844.00.520.8382%95%+0.37+0.53-0.16YES
2024-06-281.0538.20.971.1581%98%-0.93+0.15-1.25YES
2025-01-271.0662.80.741.4764%68%+0.49+0.52-0.07YES
2022-10-201.1874.20.781.5750%60%-0.67+0.15-0.78YES
2023-12-051.2229.50.731.4956%86%+0.12+0.18-0.36
2023-11-011.2555.00.531.1756%63%+0.42+0.57-0.24YES
cohort low29.50.520.6750%59%-0.93+0.03-1.77
cohort median50.50.781.1566%78%+0.37+0.52-0.24
cohort high74.20.981.5782%98%+0.71+0.82-0.01
cohort hit rate6/125/12
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.

2024-10-25 d=0.64 vwap -0.19· hi +0.68 @10:23 · IBgap +0.25· vwapΔ +0.26 · retr 66%/73%max closed -0.78 ATR
2023-08-11 d=0.69 vwap -0.13· hi +0.79 @10:24 · IBgap +0.29· vwapΔ +0.37 · retr 77%/83%max closed +0.29 ATR
2026-01-06 d=0.86 vwap -0.07· hi +0.60 @10:26 · IBgap +0.23· vwapΔ +0.22 · retr 62%/88%max closed +0.55 ATR
2025-10-15 d=0.88 vwap -0.13· hi +0.69 @10:10 · IBgap +0.33· vwapΔ +0.33 · retr 75%/77%max closed -0.51 ATR
2025-06-23 d=0.89 vwap -0.05· hi +0.63 @10:20 · IBgap +0.25· vwapΔ +0.48 · retr 57%/59%max closed +0.71 ATR
2025-02-12 d=0.90 vwap -0.09· hi +0.85 @10:38 · IBgap +0.09· vwapΔ +0.39 · retr 66%/78%max closed +0.57 ATR
2025-08-14 d=0.98 vwap -0.15· hi +0.63 @10:48 · IBgap +0.05· vwapΔ +0.29 · retr 82%/95%max closed +0.37 ATR
2024-06-28 d=1.05 vwap -0.24· hi +0.84 @10:12 · IBgap +0.12· vwapΔ +0.42 · retr 81%/98%max closed -0.93 ATR
2025-01-27 d=1.06 vwap -0.22· hi +0.80 @10:42 · IBgap +0.11· vwapΔ +0.18 · retr 64%/68%max closed +0.49 ATR
2022-10-20 d=1.18 vwap +0.00· hi +0.64 @10:20 · IBgap +0.31· vwapΔ +0.29 · retr 50%/60%max closed -0.67 ATR
2023-12-05 d=1.22 vwap +0.01· hi +0.80 @11:07 · IBgap +0.20· vwapΔ +0.33 · retr 56%/86%max closed +0.12 ATR
2023-11-01 d=1.25 vwap +0.02· hi +0.49 @10:46 · IBgap +0.27· vwapΔ +0.24 · retr 56%/63%max closed +0.42 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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