Mountain Frog Research

Sessions most like 2026-08-26, as of 11:30 ET

A light-volume morning that made its push early, gave much of it back through the middle of the session, and comes into the cutoff balanced on its VWAP.

What would separate them: What separates these camps is visible in the tape rather than in advance: whether price holds the VWAP shelf it is balancing on or gives up the morning low, and whether the morning high gets tested with force or merely drifted into. Worth noting too whether any move away from the shelf arrives with a pickup in volume or continues on the same thin flow that has carried the session so far.

What these sessions share is the shape of a morning that peaked early and then spent the balance of it unwinding — the give-back runs deeper here than in a typical session, and most of the cohort had erased the bulk of the morning move at its worst point. Today matches that shape but arrives at the cutoff having handed back less than most of them, sitting flat against VWAP rather than pinned at the lower edge. Where it separates clearly is participation: volume is running lighter than the corpus norm and at the quiet end of this group, and the opening range is narrower than the matched sessions typically carry. What the cohort did after the cutoff was not of a piece, and the camps below sort it on that rather than on the morning that got them matched.

Reclaimed and ran 3 of 12

These turned back up from the cutoff and kept going, trading through the morning high and closing well above where they sat at midday, though off the best levels. Downside after the cutoff was minor and brief.

new high 3 new low 0 median to close +0.37 ATR
Poked and stalled 4 of 12

These pushed past the morning high but could not build on it, and the afternoon range stayed compressed. The close landed near where price was sitting at the cutoff.

new high 4 new low 0 median to close +0.13 ATR
Whipsawed each way 2 of 12

These lost the morning low after the cutoff and swung hard from there, with some also sweeping the upper end before the close. Where they finished had more to do with which sweep came last than with any sustained drive.

new high 1 new low 2 median to close +0.32 ATR
Lost the low 1 of 12

This session broke the morning low and trended away from it for the rest of the day, closing at the low end of a range far wider than anything else in the group.

new high 0 new low 1 median to close -1.66 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.

2026-08-26 — TODAY vwap -0.00· hi +0.54 @10:04 · IBgap -0.30· vwapΔ +0.15 · retr 51%/93%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
+0.48 ATR
median run from the cutoff price · +0.13 ATR beyond the morning high itself
Heat before it got there
-0.14 ATR
worst excursion against you between the cutoff and the extreme — not the whole session · worst -0.20 ATR · typically reached 14:55
What would catch it off guard
3 did something else
2 expanded downward, 1 went both ways · worst close -1.66 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
2026-08-26 — today0.0044.20.540.6951%93%in progress
2024-08-070.7765.80.551.3067%108%-1.66+0.08-1.76YES
2024-11-220.8251.20.601.2063%122%+0.17+0.31-0.14YES
2025-03-171.00101.20.400.5661%80%+0.29+0.56-0.14YES
2023-08-301.1446.00.631.0954%140%+0.11+0.26-0.11YES
2023-07-071.2431.20.570.9618%88%-0.43+0.89-0.53YESYES
2025-01-131.2564.20.521.2665%71%+0.71+0.76-0.20YES
2023-11-031.2755.00.451.3464%97%+0.13+0.43+0.00YES
2023-07-101.2931.50.571.0067%110%+0.32+0.33-0.37YES
2025-12-011.3087.00.361.0626%99%-0.08+0.22-0.20YES
2023-01-101.3657.20.531.3274%137%+0.47+0.48-0.14YES
2025-01-301.4254.80.661.0868%68%+0.37+0.68-0.21YES
2024-09-091.4657.80.401.0779%82%+0.37+0.61-0.02YES
cohort low31.20.360.5618%68%-1.66+0.08-1.76
cohort median57.20.551.0965%99%+0.29+0.48-0.14
cohort high101.20.661.3479%140%+0.71+0.89+0.00
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.

2024-08-07 d=0.77 vwap -0.05· hi +0.48 @10:01 · IBgap -0.20· vwapΔ +0.19 · retr 67%/108%max closed -1.66 ATR
2024-11-22 d=0.82 vwap -0.04· hi +0.49 @09:48 · IBgap -0.29· vwapΔ +0.13 · retr 63%/122%max closed +0.17 ATR
2025-03-17 d=1.00 vwap -0.08· hi +0.37 @09:55 · IBgap -0.16· vwapΔ +0.16 · retr 61%/80%max closed +0.29 ATR
2023-08-30 d=1.14 vwap +0.06· hi +0.45 @10:14 · IBgap -0.29· vwapΔ +0.06 · retr 54%/140%max closed +0.11 ATR
2023-07-07 d=1.24 vwap +0.12· hi +0.53 @10:01 · IBgap -0.12· vwapΔ +0.16 · retr 18%/88%max closed -0.43 ATR
2025-01-13 d=1.25 vwap -0.03· hi +0.53 @10:47 · IBgap -0.21· vwapΔ +0.20 · retr 65%/71%max closed +0.71 ATR
2023-11-03 d=1.27 vwap -0.02· hi +0.43 @10:00 · IBgap -0.05· vwapΔ +0.13 · retr 64%/97%max closed +0.13 ATR
2023-07-10 d=1.29 vwap -0.07· hi +0.53 @10:09 · IBgap -0.08· vwapΔ +0.03 · retr 67%/110%max closed +0.32 ATR
2025-12-01 d=1.30 vwap +0.08· hi +0.35 @09:56 · IBgap -0.10· vwapΔ +0.14 · retr 26%/99%max closed -0.08 ATR
2023-01-10 d=1.36 vwap -0.03· hi +0.48 @10:16 · IBgap -0.19· vwapΔ +0.01 · retr 74%/137%max closed +0.47 ATR
2025-01-30 d=1.42 vwap -0.09· hi +0.37 @09:51 · IBgap -0.25· vwapΔ -0.12 · retr 68%/68%max closed +0.37 ATR
2024-09-09 d=1.46 vwap -0.07· hi +0.31 @10:11 · IBgap -0.13· vwapΔ -0.02 · retr 79%/82%max closed +0.37 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).