Mountain Frog Research

Sessions most like 2026-08-19, as of 11:30 ET

A morning push that has been handed back in full by the cutoff, leaving price at the origin of the move rather than at the edge of the range.

What would separate them: The tell is in how attempts are treated, not in how the morning looked: whether a push away from the midday area is accepted, with trade building at the new level and pullbacks holding, or handed straight back into the range that has held since the morning high. The other marker is the level the morning advance began from, and whether it turns attempts back or gets accepted and used as a floor.

What these sessions share is not how far they travelled before the cutoff but that the travel stopped counting: each drove to a morning extreme and then gave the advance back, so by late morning the day was sitting where it started instead of where it had been. That round trip is far deeper than a typical morning produces by this hour, and it is the property the match is keying on. Today sits mid-pack for volatility inside this group, but its tape is busier than most of these days ran, closer to ordinary participation than to the quiet drift many of them had. Its initial balance is also narrower against its own daily range than the cohort's middle.

Lifted and held 6 of 12

The afternoon bid these back up and away from where the cutoff found them, and the close came near the upper end of the day rather than in the middle of it. Adverse travel below the cutoff stayed minor, so the morning round trip read in hindsight as a reset rather than a top.

new high 6 new low 0 median to close +0.40 ATR
Probed and faded 3 of 12

Attempts away from the midday area in either direction did not stick, and the close landed near where the cutoff had found them. The afternoon range stayed inside ground the morning had already covered, so whatever the day decided, it decided before lunch.

new high 2 new low 1 median to close -0.04 ATR
Rolled over 2 of 12

These kept pressing after the cutoff and closed toward the weak end of the session, cutting a fresh low along the way. The deeper of them printed fresh extremes on either side of the midday area before finishing down there, a whipsaw rather than a steady bleed.

new high 1 new low 2 median to close -0.23 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.

2026-08-19 — TODAY vwap +0.13· hi +0.33 @11:01 · IBgap +0.10· vwapΔ -0.01 · retr 132%/150%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 upward
after the cutoff, by which extremes they took
Room past the level
+0.43 ATR
median run from the cutoff price · +0.36 ATR beyond the morning high itself
Heat before it got there
-0.05 ATR
worst excursion against you between the cutoff and the extreme — not the whole session · worst -0.13 ATR · typically reached 14:35
What would catch it off guard
3 did something else
2 expanded downward, 1 went both ways · worst close -0.72 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
2026-08-19 — today0.0065.00.391.04132%150%in progress
2023-09-140.4437.00.451.11130%150%+0.24+0.43-0.13YES
2025-11-250.6685.00.651.36142%150%+0.54+0.69-0.02YES
2024-01-240.7536.20.410.99109%150%-0.72+0.23-0.81YESYES
2024-12-260.7735.50.680.63150%150%+0.13+0.49-0.12YES
2022-11-220.7763.20.360.79150%150%+0.40+0.43-0.09YES
2025-02-050.7752.00.500.83128%135%+0.56+0.61-0.03YES
2025-12-220.7853.00.320.75150%150%+0.00+0.13-0.09YES
2025-03-250.7994.80.200.64129%150%-0.04+0.01-0.22YES
2024-04-080.8434.50.470.78131%150%-0.23+0.06-0.49YES
2026-04-240.8774.20.290.90150%150%+0.28+0.36-0.05YES
2022-11-030.8871.80.571.52106%150%-0.10+0.34-0.11YES
2023-04-060.9059.20.280.98133%150%+0.35+0.40-0.02YES
cohort low34.50.200.63106%135%-0.72+0.01-0.81
cohort median59.20.450.90133%150%+0.24+0.40-0.09
cohort high94.80.681.52150%150%+0.56+0.69-0.02
cohort hit rate10/123/12
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.

2023-09-14 d=0.44 vwap +0.19· hi +0.24 @11:10 · IBgap +0.06· vwapΔ -0.00 · retr 130%/150%max closed +0.24 ATR
2025-11-25 d=0.66 vwap +0.24· hi +0.29 @10:46 · IBgap +0.05· vwapΔ -0.06 · retr 142%/150%max closed +0.54 ATR
2024-01-24 d=0.75 vwap +0.11· hi +0.23 @10:45 · IBgap +0.08· vwapΔ +0.01 · retr 109%/150%max closed -0.72 ATR
2024-12-26 d=0.77 vwap +0.21· hi +0.43 @11:20 · IBgap +0.11· vwapΔ +0.01 · retr 150%/150%max closed +0.13 ATR
2022-11-22 d=0.77 vwap +0.11· hi +0.19 @10:56 · IBgap +0.18· vwapΔ +0.04 · retr 150%/150%max closed +0.40 ATR
2025-02-05 d=0.77 vwap +0.20· hi +0.14 @11:10 · IBgap +0.12· vwapΔ -0.05 · retr 128%/135%max closed +0.56 ATR
2025-12-22 d=0.78 vwap +0.18· hi +0.20 @11:20 · IBgap +0.08· vwapΔ -0.04 · retr 150%/150%max closed +0.00 ATR
2025-03-25 d=0.79 vwap +0.05· hi +0.12 @10:52 · IBgap +0.12· vwapΔ -0.01 · retr 129%/150%max closed -0.04 ATR
2024-04-08 d=0.84 vwap +0.12· hi +0.30 @10:50 · IBgap +0.27· vwapΔ -0.01 · retr 131%/150%max closed -0.23 ATR
2026-04-24 d=0.87 vwap +0.19· hi +0.20 @11:23 · IBgap +0.04· vwapΔ +0.02 · retr 150%/150%max closed +0.28 ATR
2022-11-03 d=0.88 vwap +0.04· hi +0.30 @11:03 · IBgap +0.20· vwapΔ +0.05 · retr 106%/150%max closed -0.10 ATR
2023-04-06 d=0.90 vwap +0.10· hi +0.10 @11:21 · IBgap +0.12· vwapΔ +0.01 · retr 133%/150%max closed +0.35 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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