Mountain Frog Research

Sessions most like 2026-08-24, as of 11:30 ET

A morning that made its high at the bell and has been leaking back ever since, on thin trade.

What would separate them: What separated these groups showed up at the edges of the morning range: whether the morning low held when the afternoon came back to test it, and whether pushes toward the opening high met supply in the same place each time. Watch the character of trade on those tests — probed and rejected, or traded through with volume arriving behind it.

What binds this group is not how the morning opened but how much of it came back: each had already handed back the bulk of its early move by the cutoff and was trading in the middle of the range it built, further retraced than most sessions are by late morning. Today's high came right at the bell and has not been bettered since, leaving price parked near the session's volume-weighted average. It sits mid-pack among these sessions on how far it has given back, and ordinary on volatility. Where it stands apart is participation — trade is lighter than the corpus median and toward the quiet end of the cohort, so this fade has arrived on thinner volume than most of them carried.

Gave way lower 4 of 12

Beyond a brief poke above the morning high on some of them, buyers showed little appetite: these left the morning low behind after the cutoff and kept pressing, closing near the weak end of the session.

new high 1 new low 4 median to close -0.51 ATR
Recovered and drove 3 of 12

Price turned up out of the midday area and held the advance into the bell, dipping only shallowly beneath where it stood at the cutoff.

new high 3 new low 0 median to close +0.40 ATR
Flushed, then reclaimed 1 of 12

This session broke out of the morning range downward after the cutoff and marked the session low there, then spent the afternoon working back up to finish above the price the read was taken at.

new high 1 new low 1 median to close +0.22 ATR
Poked and faded 3 of 12

These poked above the morning's high after the cutoff but found no follow-through, wandering modestly in either direction and finishing near where the read was taken.

new high 3 new low 1 median to close -0.11 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.

2026-08-24 — TODAY vwap +0.08· hi +0.02 @09:30 · IBgap +0.02· vwapΔ -0.12 · retr 62%/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
5 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
-0.13 ATR
worst excursion against you between the cutoff and the extreme — not the whole session · worst -0.23 ATR · typically reached 15:25
What would catch it off guard
7 did something else
4 expanded downward, 3 went both ways · worst close -0.83 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
2026-08-24 — today0.0054.50.510.7962%77%in progress
2026-03-270.2686.00.491.1362%74%-0.83+0.14-0.93YES
2025-07-230.3239.20.510.6358%65%+0.87+0.88-0.09YES
2023-06-210.3938.00.491.0754%66%-0.11+0.45-0.19YES
2024-09-100.4457.80.540.9768%78%+0.22+0.29-0.71YESYES
2024-04-020.4735.00.581.0966%75%+0.40+0.42-0.21YES
2023-10-120.4747.80.441.1159%95%-0.51+0.26-1.04YESYES
2026-08-170.4768.80.270.6265%77%-0.43+0.01-0.47YES
2023-04-110.4848.00.200.8269%91%-0.01+0.29-0.11YES
2025-10-310.5350.00.570.9254%91%-0.34+0.22-0.91YES
2024-03-220.5536.80.290.6663%65%-0.14+0.24-0.22YESYES
2023-11-090.5749.80.431.0558%77%-0.72+0.13-0.83YES
2023-05-250.5845.50.531.4053%97%+0.23+0.57-0.23YES
cohort low35.00.200.6253%65%-0.83+0.01-1.04
cohort median48.00.491.0562%77%-0.11+0.29-0.23
cohort high86.00.581.4069%97%+0.87+0.88-0.09
cohort hit rate8/127/12
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.

2026-03-27 d=0.26 vwap +0.10· hi +0.01 @09:30 · IBgap -0.03· vwapΔ -0.15 · retr 62%/74%max closed -0.83 ATR
2025-07-23 d=0.32 vwap +0.08· hi +0.02 @09:30 · IBgap +0.05· vwapΔ -0.15 · retr 58%/65%max closed +0.87 ATR
2023-06-21 d=0.39 vwap +0.04· hi +0.02 @09:30 · IBgap +0.06· vwapΔ -0.15 · retr 54%/66%max closed -0.11 ATR
2024-09-10 d=0.44 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=0.47 vwap +0.08· hi +0.06 @09:30 · IBgap +0.01· vwapΔ -0.24 · retr 66%/75%max closed +0.40 ATR
2023-10-12 d=0.47 vwap +0.03· hi +0.01 @09:30 · IBgap +0.05· vwapΔ -0.13 · retr 59%/95%max closed -0.51 ATR
2026-08-17 d=0.47 vwap +0.03· hi +0.09 @09:31 · IBgap +0.09· vwapΔ -0.11 · retr 65%/77%max closed -0.43 ATR
2023-04-11 d=0.48 vwap +0.03· hi +0.01 @09:30 · IBgap +0.03· vwapΔ -0.05 · retr 69%/91%max closed -0.01 ATR
2025-10-31 d=0.53 vwap -0.00· hi +0.01 @09:30 · IBgap +0.04· vwapΔ -0.17 · retr 54%/91%max closed -0.34 ATR
2024-03-22 d=0.55 vwap -0.01· hi +0.10 @09:40 · IBgap +0.00· vwapΔ -0.10 · retr 63%/65%max closed -0.14 ATR
2023-11-09 d=0.57 vwap +0.06· hi +0.01 @09:30 · IBgap -0.09· vwapΔ -0.17 · retr 58%/77%max closed -0.72 ATR
2023-05-25 d=0.58 vwap +0.06· hi +0.02 @09:30 · IBgap +0.08· vwapΔ -0.08 · retr 53%/97%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.

Charts rendered with Lightweight Charts™, Copyright © 2026 TradingView, Inc. (Apache-2.0).