Mountain Frog Research

Sessions most like 2026-08-20, as of 11:30 ET

A late-morning high already handed back, with the day resting on its own average price.

What would separate them: Watch how price handles the morning high area and the session low on their next approach — whether either gets taken and held, or gets rejected quickly. Watch too whether volume expands as price leaves the volume-weighted average, or the tape thins out through the early afternoon.

The matched sessions share a shape rather than a size: an early push, a high posted late in the morning, and a giveback deep enough to erase most of what the push built — much further retraced than a session is at this hour. Today sits toward the higher-volatility end of that group, on a wider daily range than the corpus norm, while participation is ordinary by corpus standards and a shade heavier than most of the matches carried. Price is sitting on the session's volume-weighted average at the cutoff, which is about the most neutral place this shape can leave it. The deepest point of today's giveback has erased the push outright, which is further than most of the group ever got.

Drive resumed 6 of 12

These afternoons picked the morning direction back up and closed above where the cutoff found them, with only minor dips along the way. How far they ran varied hugely — the strongest went far beyond anything else here.

new high 6 new low 1 median to close +0.48 ATR
Flushed then recovered 2 of 12

These flushed hard below the midday price after the cutoff — the hardest of them cut through the morning's low — before buyers took it back. Each closed above where the cutoff found it.

new high 2 new low 1 median to close +0.38 ATR
Round trip 3 of 12

Price worked in either direction through the afternoon and finished near where the cutoff found it. The afternoon range was real; the net move was not.

new high 3 new low 2 median to close -0.06 ATR
Kept selling 1 of 12

This session simply kept going down after the giveback, made its low late, and closed at the weak end of the day. It was the sole match that barely traded back above its midday price at any point.

new high 0 new low 1 median to close -0.22 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.

2026-08-20 — TODAY vwap +0.00· hi +0.34 @11:03 · IBgap -0.16· vwapΔ +0.04 · retr 66%/101%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
7 of 12 expanded upward
after the cutoff, by which extremes they took
Room past the level
+0.52 ATR
median run from the cutoff price · +0.39 ATR beyond the morning high itself
Heat before it got there
-0.12 ATR
worst excursion against you between the cutoff and the extreme — not the whole session · worst -0.37 ATR · typically reached 16:00
What would catch it off guard
5 did something else
4 went both ways, 1 expanded downward · worst close -0.22 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
2026-08-20 — today0.0065.00.381.0466%101%in progress
2023-07-130.5131.00.350.7569%96%+0.48+0.76-0.07YES
2026-03-190.6984.20.521.0570%89%+0.25+0.64-0.26YES
2023-05-010.8839.00.350.8977%93%-0.09+0.46-0.15YESYES
2024-07-160.9835.00.441.1461%66%+0.38+0.48-0.37YES
2024-03-151.0639.20.651.2465%102%-0.22+0.04-0.61YES
2023-06-231.0735.50.370.9680%104%+0.04+0.54-0.20YESYES
2025-03-211.08101.20.240.9376%81%+0.43+0.51-0.12YES
2025-01-131.1764.20.521.2665%71%+0.71+0.76-0.20YES
2024-03-041.2234.80.190.7353%76%-0.06+0.52-0.08YES
2024-02-211.2338.00.310.7556%64%+0.36+0.43-0.61YESYES
2024-05-061.2366.00.200.6359%86%+0.38+0.38-0.06YES
2023-12-131.2626.50.260.6650%56%+2.12+2.25-0.29YESYES
cohort low26.50.190.6350%56%-0.22+0.04-0.61
cohort median39.00.350.9365%86%+0.38+0.52-0.20
cohort high101.20.651.2680%104%+2.12+2.25-0.06
cohort hit rate11/125/12
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.

2023-07-13 d=0.51 vwap -0.03· hi +0.21 @11:01 · IBgap -0.20· vwapΔ +0.08 · retr 69%/96%max closed +0.48 ATR
2026-03-19 d=0.69 vwap +0.01· hi +0.34 @11:07 · IBgap -0.14· vwapΔ +0.20 · retr 70%/89%max closed +0.25 ATR
2023-05-01 d=0.88 vwap -0.11· hi +0.44 @11:01 · IBgap -0.07· vwapΔ +0.16 · retr 77%/93%max closed -0.09 ATR
2024-07-16 d=0.98 vwap +0.12· hi +0.46 @11:12 · IBgap -0.14· vwapΔ +0.04 · retr 61%/66%max closed +0.38 ATR
2024-03-15 d=1.06 vwap +0.07· hi +0.40 @10:49 · IBgap +0.02· vwapΔ -0.08 · retr 65%/102%max closed -0.22 ATR
2023-06-23 d=1.07 vwap -0.07· hi +0.39 @10:40 · IBgap -0.01· vwapΔ +0.13 · retr 80%/104%max closed +0.04 ATR
2025-03-21 d=1.08 vwap +0.00· hi +0.27 @11:00 · IBgap +0.04· vwapΔ +0.05 · retr 76%/81%max closed +0.43 ATR
2025-01-13 d=1.17 vwap -0.03· hi +0.53 @10:47 · IBgap -0.21· vwapΔ +0.20 · retr 65%/71%max closed +0.71 ATR
2024-03-04 d=1.22 vwap -0.00· hi +0.24 @10:42 · IBgap +0.03· vwapΔ +0.08 · retr 53%/76%max closed -0.06 ATR
2024-02-21 d=1.23 vwap +0.09· hi +0.24 @11:15 · IBgap -0.00· vwapΔ +0.04 · retr 56%/64%max closed +0.36 ATR
2024-05-06 d=1.23 vwap -0.00· hi +0.14 @10:42 · IBgap +0.02· vwapΔ +0.10 · retr 59%/86%max closed +0.38 ATR
2023-12-13 d=1.26 vwap +0.07· hi +0.32 @11:01 · IBgap -0.02· vwapΔ +0.09 · retr 50%/56%max closed +2.12 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).