Sessions most like 2026-08-18, as of 11:30 ET
What would separate them: The morning low is the tell: in the sessions that lifted, breaks below it reversed at once and the reclaim carried on to fresh highs, while the probing group pushed the break further and, having reclaimed the level, got little more out of it. The expansion group announced itself differently, leaving the morning range and continuing rather than snapping back within minutes of the break.
These sessions share the same skeleton: the high arrived shortly after the open, the tape stayed mostly quiet through the morning, and price slid back into the body of the range instead of pressing the extreme. What separated them was what came after the cutoff, not what came before it. Today sits deeper into its morning give-back than most of the cohort had at this stage, though its worst pullback so far is on the modest side of theirs. It is also trading at a more ordinary pace than most of these mornings did, closer to the corpus norm for volume than to the quiet group it matched into.
After the cutoff these worked higher and kept it, closing near the upper end of their afternoon range. Some broke the morning low on the way, but the break reversed at once and the reclaim carried on to fresh highs.
Sellers pushed price through the morning low during the afternoon and got nothing for it. Price drifted back toward where it had been trading at the cutoff and finished near there.
Neither side found traction after the cutoff. Travel was slight in each direction, nothing that left the morning range stuck, and the session finished near where it stood at the cutoff.
These left the morning range in each direction and covered far more ground after the cutoff than the rest of the cohort. Their closes diverged sharply: a violent pop that came back to the cutoff price by the bell, against a sustained slide that finished near the session low.
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.
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 | session | dist | ATR | IB /ATR | RVOL | retr now | retr max | to close | max up | max down | new high | new low |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2026-08-18 — today | 0.00 | 65.0 | 0.29 | 0.99 | 40% | 54% | in progress | |||||
| 2024-06-06 | 0.41 | 34.5 | 0.32 | 0.80 | 33% | 70% | +0.04 | +0.07 | -0.54 | — | YES | |
| 2025-06-25 | 0.54 | 53.0 | 0.23 | 0.61 | 27% | 45% | +0.01 | +0.05 | -0.31 | — | YES | |
| 2024-05-03 | 0.66 | 66.0 | 0.59 | 1.52 | 45% | 50% | +0.23 | +0.35 | -0.00 | — | — | |
| 2026-08-12 | 0.66 | 68.8 | 0.44 | 0.75 | 33% | 57% | +0.02 | +0.19 | -0.12 | — | — | |
| 2024-05-01 | 0.68 | 66.0 | 0.27 | 0.84 | 56% | 58% | -0.09 | +1.13 | -0.15 | YES | YES | |
| 2022-11-02 | 0.69 | 71.8 | 0.28 | 0.84 | 29% | 56% | -1.09 | +0.86 | -1.10 | YES | YES | |
| 2024-10-24 | 0.70 | 45.5 | 0.33 | 0.75 | 23% | 66% | +0.12 | +0.28 | -0.46 | — | YES | |
| 2023-08-28 | 0.71 | 44.0 | 0.33 | 0.90 | 23% | 64% | +0.28 | +0.46 | -0.14 | YES | YES | |
| 2025-05-12 | 0.73 | 86.8 | 0.44 | 1.07 | 42% | 72% | +0.46 | +0.48 | -0.10 | YES | — | |
| 2023-03-29 | 0.75 | 64.2 | 0.16 | 0.87 | 52% | 60% | +0.32 | +0.35 | -0.02 | YES | — | |
| 2024-03-22 | 0.75 | 36.8 | 0.29 | 0.66 | 63% | 65% | -0.14 | +0.24 | -0.22 | YES | YES | |
| 2025-06-30 | 0.76 | 47.5 | 0.33 | 0.67 | 31% | 56% | +0.32 | +0.61 | -0.26 | YES | YES | |
| cohort low | 34.5 | 0.16 | 0.61 | 23% | 45% | -1.09 | +0.05 | -1.10 | ||||
| cohort median | 64.2 | 0.33 | 0.84 | 33% | 60% | +0.12 | +0.35 | -0.15 | ||||
| cohort high | 86.8 | 0.59 | 1.52 | 63% | 72% | +0.46 | +1.13 | -0.00 | ||||
| cohort hit rate | 7/12 | 8/12 | ||||||||||
| CORPUS median (n=967) | 50.5 | 0.51 | 1.00 | 34% | 60% | +0.05 | +0.30 | -0.28 | ||||
| CORPUS base rate | 56% | 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.
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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