Mountain Frog Research

Sessions most like 2026-08-27, as of 11:30 ET

A morning that made its high just before the cutoff and has been slipping since, on notably light participation.

What would separate them: Worth watching is whether the pullback finds buyers where earlier dips did and the pushes back up carry rising trade behind them, or whether the give-back deepens while attempts higher fade quickly on thin volume. How the late-morning high is handled on a retest, accepted through or rejected, is the cleanest tell for which of these groups today ends up resembling.

What these sessions share is not the early range, which the matcher picks by construction, but how little of the morning advance they had surrendered by the cutoff: most were still pressed up against their highs, far tighter than a typical session at that stage. Today is the ragged edge of that group. Its give-back is deeper than most of the analogs and much closer to what an ordinary session shows, and it is sitting near the worst of that give-back right now rather than well off it. Trade is also lighter than the wider sample's norm and near the quiet end of the cohort, with a daily range on the calmer side of a group that runs from placid to very wide.

Drive resumed 3 of 12

These made fresh highs after the cutoff with almost no downside along the way, and each finished firmer than where it stood at the cutoff. The pullback in place at the cutoff turned out to be a pause rather than a turn.

new high 3 new low 0 median to close +0.42 ATR
Marked time 6 of 12

This group nudged marginally above the late-morning high and then did very little with it, closing within a hair of where it stood at the cutoff. Neither side got traction, and the afternoon was chop around the same area.

new high 6 new low 0 median to close +0.11 ATR
Gave it back 2 of 12

Pushes higher after the cutoff got nowhere, a marginal poke through the morning high at best, and the give-back deepened steadily into a soft close. The morning's low was never taken out, but the day finished well under where it stood at the cutoff.

new high 1 new low 0 median to close -0.21 ATR
Reversed outright 1 of 12

This session traded straight down through the morning low and kept going, running far beneath it before buyers turned up. It recovered a good part of the damage into the close but still finished meaningfully lower, by a wide margin the deepest give-back in the group.

new high 0 new low 1 median to close -0.33 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.

2026-08-27 — TODAY vwap +0.28· hi +0.60 @11:17 · IBgap +0.39· vwapΔ +0.25 · retr 30%/34%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
10 of 12 expanded upward
after the cutoff, by which extremes they took
Room past the level
+0.23 ATR
median run from the cutoff price · +0.13 ATR beyond the morning high itself
Heat before it got there
-0.10 ATR
worst excursion against you between the cutoff and the extreme — not the whole session · worst -0.19 ATR · typically reached 14:55
What would catch it off guard
2 did something else
1 expanded downward, 1 stayed in balance · worst close -0.33 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
2026-08-27 — today0.0044.00.620.9330%34%in progress
2026-01-090.3448.00.891.1726%27%+0.23+0.50-0.07YES
2023-03-140.6548.20.501.3014%16%-0.33+0.07-1.31YES
2026-02-240.6780.50.801.1316%22%+0.16+0.28-0.12YES
2026-01-230.6946.00.600.7631%37%-0.21+0.12-0.52
2023-12-120.7126.50.650.8330%40%+0.64+0.66-0.10YES
2026-03-040.7384.20.811.0630%50%-0.02+0.23-0.07YES
2024-08-080.7765.80.961.2915%16%+0.42+0.53-0.19YES
2024-11-180.7747.20.440.8616%18%-0.09+0.18-0.36YES
2022-12-210.7957.00.441.0021%31%-0.04+0.17-0.22YES
2026-02-180.8279.80.720.9814%19%-0.26+0.12-0.55YES
2024-04-230.8356.80.571.1315%37%+0.14+0.22-0.11YES
2025-10-080.8347.80.550.798%17%+0.11+0.14-0.09YES
cohort low26.50.440.768%16%-0.33+0.07-1.31
cohort median56.80.651.0616%27%+0.11+0.22-0.12
cohort high84.20.961.3031%50%+0.64+0.66-0.07
cohort hit rate10/121/12
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.

2026-01-09 d=0.34 vwap +0.23· hi +0.65 @11:14 · IBgap +0.39· vwapΔ +0.21 · retr 26%/27%max closed +0.23 ATR
2023-03-14 d=0.65 vwap +0.30· hi +0.61 @11:26 · IBgap +0.34· vwapΔ +0.23 · retr 14%/16%max closed -0.33 ATR
2026-02-24 d=0.67 vwap +0.24· hi +0.63 @11:14 · IBgap +0.44· vwapΔ +0.36 · retr 16%/22%max closed +0.16 ATR
2026-01-23 d=0.69 vwap +0.22· hi +0.63 @11:03 · IBgap +0.28· vwapΔ +0.21 · retr 31%/37%max closed -0.21 ATR
2023-12-12 d=0.71 vwap +0.29· hi +0.44 @11:05 · IBgap +0.37· vwapΔ +0.15 · retr 30%/40%max closed +0.64 ATR
2026-03-04 d=0.73 vwap +0.18· hi +0.61 @11:03 · IBgap +0.40· vwapΔ +0.14 · retr 30%/50%max closed -0.02 ATR
2024-08-08 d=0.77 vwap +0.32· hi +0.71 @11:27 · IBgap +0.44· vwapΔ +0.31 · retr 15%/16%max closed +0.42 ATR
2024-11-18 d=0.77 vwap +0.36· hi +0.61 @11:27 · IBgap +0.29· vwapΔ +0.27 · retr 16%/18%max closed -0.09 ATR
2022-12-21 d=0.79 vwap +0.24· hi +0.71 @11:10 · IBgap +0.29· vwapΔ +0.36 · retr 21%/31%max closed -0.04 ATR
2026-02-18 d=0.82 vwap +0.23· hi +0.63 @11:07 · IBgap +0.30· vwapΔ +0.35 · retr 14%/19%max closed -0.26 ATR
2024-04-23 d=0.83 vwap +0.22· hi +0.63 @10:59 · IBgap +0.30· vwapΔ +0.35 · retr 15%/37%max closed +0.14 ATR
2025-10-08 d=0.83 vwap +0.30· hi +0.53 @11:26 · IBgap +0.31· vwapΔ +0.21 · retr 8%/17%max closed +0.11 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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