Mountain Frog Research

Sessions most like 2026-08-21, as of 11:30 ET

A round-trip morning — the high sits barely above the opening print, and the push off it has already been handed back.

What would separate them: The thing to watch is whether the level that stopped the retrace is accepted or rejected on the retest, and whether volume picks up while it happens — drift on the same thin tape looks different from a push that brings participation with it. Also worth watching as the lunch period ends: whether the morning high is revisited, or simply left behind.

What binds this group is a morning that settled nothing: a high close to where the day opened, then a slide that gave the move back, and each of them carried past where it began. Against the broader corpus that is the unusual part — the typical session still holds much of its morning travel at this hour, and these did not. Today sits mid-pack on how much has come back, but toward the modest end of the group on how far past the origin the pullback has reached. It also arrives lighter than a typical session on volume and on a wider daily range backdrop than most, which is a market covering ground with few hands behind it.

Gave way lower 3 of 12

These pressed lower after the cutoff — any poke higher was marginal and brief — and closed near the day's low, the afternoon supplying the bulk of the range.

new high 1 new low 3 median to close -0.55 ATR
Reclaimed and ran 2 of 12

In these the retrace marked the low of the day: price turned back up through the morning high and closed near the top, so the afternoon carried the whole of the session's progress.

new high 2 new low 0 median to close +0.88 ATR
Slow leak lower 3 of 12

These leaked to marginal new session lows without any drive behind it — the afternoon push stayed contained and the close finished near the lows, a grind rather than a break.

new high 0 new low 3 median to close -0.24 ATR
Chopped in place 4 of 12

These resolved nothing: price probed to either side of the cutoff level, and the poke in each direction was cancelled by the reverse, leaving the finish near where the afternoon began.

new high 4 new low 2 median to close +0.08 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.

2026-08-21 — TODAY vwap +0.13· hi +0.07 @11:04 · IBgap +0.04· vwapΔ -0.04 · retr 95%/121%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 downward
after the cutoff, by which extremes they took
Room past the level
-0.36 ATR
median run from the cutoff price
Heat before it got there
+0.07 ATR
worst excursion against you between the cutoff and the extreme — not the whole session · worst +0.12 ATR · typically reached 14:50
What would catch it off guard
7 did something else
4 expanded upward, 3 went both ways · worst close +0.88 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
2026-08-21 — today0.0061.00.320.8095%121%in progress
2023-10-270.6058.80.371.5488%117%-0.54+0.01-0.81YES
2023-05-170.6936.00.510.9383%125%+0.88+1.06-0.05YES
2026-01-150.7247.50.330.94112%133%-0.55+0.13-0.76YESYES
2023-10-310.7557.50.371.1177%122%+0.44+0.49-0.09YES
2023-09-050.7944.00.400.9270%121%-0.24+0.10-0.26YES
2026-05-070.8660.50.270.8889%150%-0.55+0.12-0.86YES
2026-04-160.8686.00.320.9591%141%+0.08+0.23-0.15YES
2025-01-160.9267.20.441.1871%109%-0.26+0.07-0.36YES
2024-06-250.9538.80.300.70108%150%+0.19+0.30-0.42YESYES
2023-12-280.9536.20.170.5593%128%+0.01+0.20-0.12YESYES
2024-06-210.9838.20.500.9192%150%-0.07+0.33-0.23YES
2026-04-100.9986.00.220.88100%150%-0.23+0.02-0.33YES
cohort low36.00.170.5570%109%-0.55+0.01-0.86
cohort median57.50.370.9391%133%-0.07+0.20-0.26
cohort high86.00.511.54112%150%+0.88+1.06-0.05
cohort hit rate7/128/12
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.

2023-10-27 d=0.60 vwap +0.11· hi +0.07 @11:17 · IBgap -0.02· vwapΔ -0.15 · retr 88%/117%max closed -0.54 ATR
2023-05-17 d=0.69 vwap +0.12· hi +0.12 @11:18 · IBgap +0.09· vwapΔ -0.16 · retr 83%/125%max closed +0.88 ATR
2026-01-15 d=0.72 vwap +0.16· hi +0.12 @11:23 · IBgap -0.00· vwapΔ -0.06 · retr 112%/133%max closed -0.55 ATR
2023-10-31 d=0.75 vwap +0.03· hi +0.07 @10:55 · IBgap +0.14· vwapΔ -0.05 · retr 77%/122%max closed +0.44 ATR
2023-09-05 d=0.79 vwap +0.05· hi +0.07 @11:09 · IBgap +0.05· vwapΔ -0.15 · retr 70%/121%max closed -0.24 ATR
2026-05-07 d=0.86 vwap +0.03· hi +0.18 @11:00 · IBgap +0.06· vwapΔ -0.01 · retr 89%/150%max closed -0.55 ATR
2026-04-16 d=0.86 vwap +0.08· hi +0.12 @11:15 · IBgap -0.10· vwapΔ -0.10 · retr 91%/141%max closed +0.08 ATR
2025-01-16 d=0.92 vwap +0.07· hi +0.04 @11:09 · IBgap -0.07· vwapΔ -0.13 · retr 71%/109%max closed -0.26 ATR
2024-06-25 d=0.95 vwap +0.08· hi +0.13 @11:18 · IBgap +0.12· vwapΔ +0.04 · retr 108%/150%max closed +0.19 ATR
2023-12-28 d=0.95 vwap -0.06· hi +0.20 @10:49 · IBgap +0.06· vwapΔ -0.01 · retr 93%/128%max closed +0.01 ATR
2024-06-21 d=0.98 vwap +0.03· hi +0.20 @11:20 · IBgap -0.02· vwapΔ -0.02 · retr 92%/150%max closed -0.07 ATR
2026-04-10 d=0.99 vwap +0.02· hi +0.09 @11:24 · IBgap +0.13· vwapΔ -0.04 · retr 100%/150%max closed -0.23 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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