Mountain Frog Research

Sessions most like 2026-08-17, as of 11:30 ET

A thin, early-high fade that has already worked back onto its own average price.

What would separate them: What separated these groups was behaviour at the early high, which price has already ground back near: whether trade is accepted above it, or it gets rejected there and the morning low then gives way — tagging the high was not enough by itself, since a session that poked through it still broke hard afterwards. The other thing to watch is pace: whether the tape stays as thin as it has been, or the afternoon brings the participation the morning has lacked.

These sessions share a shape rather than a size: the high arrived early, the session sold away from it, and by the cutoff price had ground most of the way back — a further-along repair than the corpus typically shows by this hour. Today fits that shape closely, with its high printed almost at the bell and price resting on its own volume-weighted average. Where today sits apart is pace and backdrop: volume is lighter than any session in the group and lighter than the corpus norm, while the volatility regime is wider than the widest of them, so the range built so far is a modest fraction of what this market has been moving. Today has also not pushed its recovery as far at its best as most of the cohort had by the same point.

Carried it through 4 of 12

These carried the repair straight through the early high and kept going, closing near the best levels of the afternoon. Very little was given back once the high went, and the session never revisited the midday level in any real way.

new high 4 new low 0 median to close +0.87 ATR
Rejected and sold 2 of 12

Here the recovery died at or just through the early high and the morning's selling resumed, breaking well beneath the midday level to a new session low. They lifted off the worst of it late but still closed under where they were trading at the cutoff.

new high 1 new low 2 median to close -0.34 ATR
Flushed then recovered 1 of 12

This session gave the repair up hard, making a new low well beneath the midday level, then bought the entire decline back and finished above where it stood at the cutoff. The damage was real while it lasted and left almost no trace on the close.

new high 1 new low 1 median to close +0.22 ATR
Went nowhere 5 of 12

These poked at the early high, in most cases through it, but the move refused to build on itself. Each excursion was given back rather than accepted, and the close landed near the level price was already trading at midday.

new high 5 new low 1 median to close -0.01 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.

2026-08-17 — TODAY vwap +0.03· hi +0.09 @09:31 · IBgap +0.09· vwapΔ -0.11 · retr 65%/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
8 of 12 expanded upward
after the cutoff, by which extremes they took
Room past the level
+0.45 ATR
median run from the cutoff price · +0.21 ATR beyond the morning high itself
Heat before it got there
-0.08 ATR
worst excursion against you between the cutoff and the extreme — not the whole session · worst -0.23 ATR · typically reached 15:30
What would catch it off guard
4 did something else
3 went both ways, 1 expanded downward · worst close -0.51 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
2026-08-17 — today0.0068.80.270.6265%77%in progress
2023-06-210.4738.00.491.0754%66%-0.11+0.45-0.19YES
2025-07-230.4939.20.510.6358%65%+0.87+0.88-0.09YES
2024-03-220.5336.80.290.6663%65%-0.14+0.24-0.22YESYES
2023-10-120.5347.80.441.1159%95%-0.51+0.26-1.04YESYES
2023-04-110.5448.00.200.8269%91%-0.01+0.29-0.11YES
2023-06-120.5635.50.280.8868%89%+0.92+0.94+0.01YES
2025-10-310.5850.00.570.9254%91%-0.34+0.22-0.91YES
2023-11-170.5944.00.270.9453%95%+0.24+0.38-0.06YES
2023-05-250.6045.50.531.4053%97%+0.23+0.57-0.23YES
2024-09-100.6257.80.540.9768%78%+0.22+0.29-0.71YESYES
2024-04-020.6335.00.581.0966%75%+0.40+0.42-0.21YES
2025-10-060.6846.50.480.7680%89%+0.10+0.30-0.03YES
cohort low35.00.200.6353%65%-0.51+0.22-1.04
cohort median45.50.490.9463%89%+0.22+0.38-0.19
cohort high57.80.581.4080%97%+0.92+0.94+0.01
cohort hit rate11/124/12
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.

2023-06-21 d=0.47 vwap +0.04· hi +0.02 @09:30 · IBgap +0.06· vwapΔ -0.15 · retr 54%/66%max closed -0.11 ATR
2025-07-23 d=0.49 vwap +0.08· hi +0.02 @09:30 · IBgap +0.05· vwapΔ -0.15 · retr 58%/65%max closed +0.87 ATR
2024-03-22 d=0.53 vwap -0.01· hi +0.10 @09:40 · IBgap +0.00· vwapΔ -0.10 · retr 63%/65%max closed -0.14 ATR
2023-10-12 d=0.53 vwap +0.03· hi +0.01 @09:30 · IBgap +0.05· vwapΔ -0.13 · retr 59%/95%max closed -0.51 ATR
2023-04-11 d=0.54 vwap +0.03· hi +0.01 @09:30 · IBgap +0.03· vwapΔ -0.05 · retr 69%/91%max closed -0.01 ATR
2023-06-12 d=0.56 vwap +0.01· hi +0.10 @09:40 · IBgap +0.01· vwapΔ -0.05 · retr 68%/89%max closed +0.92 ATR
2025-10-31 d=0.58 vwap -0.00· hi +0.01 @09:30 · IBgap +0.04· vwapΔ -0.17 · retr 54%/91%max closed -0.34 ATR
2023-11-17 d=0.59 vwap -0.04· hi +0.09 @09:30 · IBgap +0.13· vwapΔ -0.08 · retr 53%/95%max closed +0.24 ATR
2023-05-25 d=0.60 vwap +0.06· hi +0.02 @09:30 · IBgap +0.08· vwapΔ -0.08 · retr 53%/97%max closed +0.23 ATR
2024-09-10 d=0.62 vwap +0.06· hi +0.05 @09:32 · IBgap -0.01· vwapΔ -0.22 · retr 68%/78%max closed +0.22 ATR
2024-04-02 d=0.63 vwap +0.08· hi +0.06 @09:30 · IBgap +0.01· vwapΔ -0.24 · retr 66%/75%max closed +0.40 ATR
2025-10-06 d=0.68 vwap +0.14· hi +0.01 @09:30 · IBgap +0.07· vwapΔ -0.15 · retr 80%/89%max closed +0.10 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).