Mountain Frog Research

Sessions most like 2026-08-31, as of 11:30 ET

A morning that topped on its opening bar, sold off, and has since worked back toward the middle of the drop on unusually thin participation.

What would separate them: Whether the morning's low breaks cleanly on a retest or gets defended is the observable line between the groups above, as is whether price keeps holding VWAP or comes away from it. Worth watching alongside that: whether participation builds in behind an afternoon push, or stays as thin as the morning has run.

What ties these sessions together is not the size of the early range — the match selects for that — but where price stood at the cutoff: the morning drive was spent, its extreme well behind them, and a good part of that move already reversed. Measured against the broader sample, they had retraced further than a typical session does by this hour. Today sits in the more contained part of that group on retracement, with less of its drive taken back than the cohort's midpoint, and its extreme came on the opening bar itself rather than later in the morning. Where it sits outside the group entirely is participation: turnover is running lighter than the quietest session here, and well under the corpus norm.

Kept pressing lower 4 of 12

These never rebuilt the give-back. The afternoon carried the morning's direction further with little more than a token bounce along the way, and price finished near the weak end of the day.

new high 0 new low 4 median to close -0.57 ATR
Ground back up 3 of 12

Price reclaimed the morning slide during the afternoon, pushed past the earlier extreme, and finished toward the strong end of the session. What downside came after the cutoff was slight.

new high 3 new low 0 median to close +0.30 ATR
Round trip 3 of 12

These travelled a long way after the cutoff — in some cases each way — and then finished about where they stood when it passed. For this group the excursion, not the close, was the event.

new high 2 new low 3 median to close -0.09 ATR
Late reversal 2 of 12

Each swung hard in a direction after the cutoff and then turned back, leaving the close well off the day's biggest excursion and on the other side of it. The path through the middle of the session said little about where it ended.

new high 2 new low 2 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.

2026-08-31 — TODAY vwap +0.01· hi +0.07 @09:31 · IBgap -0.11· vwapΔ -0.25 · retr 48%/67%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
-0.76 ATR
median run from the cutoff price
Heat before it got there
+0.03 ATR
worst excursion against you between the cutoff and the extreme — not the whole session · worst +0.13 ATR · typically reached 15:35
What would catch it off guard
7 did something else
4 went both ways, 3 expanded upward · worst close +0.46 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
2026-08-31 — today0.0044.00.670.7248%67%in progress
2025-05-290.3461.80.770.8648%56%-0.12+0.02-0.76YES
2025-07-220.4439.50.770.9051%71%+0.30+0.51-0.16YES
2023-05-240.4945.50.481.3247%77%-0.02+0.35-0.30YESYES
2023-11-090.5149.80.431.0558%77%-0.72+0.13-0.83YES
2024-05-300.6333.00.490.9963%67%-0.36+0.41-0.77YESYES
2024-11-140.6743.50.640.9361%82%-0.68+0.11-0.87YES
2023-11-210.6943.20.300.7445%69%+0.18+0.27-0.07YES
2025-05-120.7286.80.441.0742%72%+0.46+0.48-0.10YES
2024-05-010.7266.00.270.8456%58%-0.09+1.13-0.15YESYES
2023-10-250.7457.50.511.4765%84%-0.57+0.03-0.69YES
2022-10-070.7486.00.541.4725%56%-0.35+0.03-0.57YES
2024-09-100.7457.80.540.9768%78%+0.22+0.29-0.71YESYES
cohort low33.00.270.7425%56%-0.72+0.02-0.87
cohort median57.50.510.9956%72%-0.09+0.29-0.57
cohort high86.80.771.4768%84%+0.46+1.13-0.07
cohort hit rate7/129/12
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.

2025-05-29 d=0.34 vwap +0.03· hi +0.02 @09:30 · IBgap -0.08· vwapΔ -0.27 · retr 48%/56%max closed -0.12 ATR
2025-07-22 d=0.44 vwap +0.04· hi +0.03 @09:39 · IBgap -0.04· vwapΔ -0.27 · retr 51%/71%max closed +0.30 ATR
2023-05-24 d=0.49 vwap +0.03· hi +0.01 @09:30 · IBgap -0.19· vwapΔ -0.22 · retr 47%/77%max closed -0.02 ATR
2023-11-09 d=0.51 vwap +0.06· hi +0.01 @09:30 · IBgap -0.09· vwapΔ -0.17 · retr 58%/77%max closed -0.72 ATR
2024-05-30 d=0.63 vwap -0.03· hi +0.14 @09:33 · IBgap -0.03· vwapΔ -0.18 · retr 63%/67%max closed -0.36 ATR
2024-11-14 d=0.67 vwap +0.02· hi +0.12 @09:30 · IBgap -0.01· vwapΔ -0.27 · retr 61%/82%max closed -0.68 ATR
2023-11-21 d=0.69 vwap -0.05· hi +0.04 @09:30 · IBgap -0.18· vwapΔ -0.10 · retr 45%/69%max closed +0.18 ATR
2025-05-12 d=0.72 vwap -0.03· hi +0.03 @09:30 · IBgap -0.02· vwapΔ -0.12 · retr 42%/72%max closed +0.46 ATR
2024-05-01 d=0.72 vwap -0.01· hi +0.06 @09:35 · IBgap -0.05· vwapΔ -0.09 · retr 56%/58%max closed -0.09 ATR
2023-10-25 d=0.74 vwap +0.12· hi +0.00 @09:30 · IBgap -0.08· vwapΔ -0.22 · retr 65%/84%max closed -0.57 ATR
2022-10-07 d=0.74 vwap -0.08· hi +0.04 @09:30 · IBgap -0.05· vwapΔ -0.24 · retr 25%/56%max closed -0.35 ATR
2024-09-10 d=0.74 vwap +0.06· hi +0.05 @09:32 · IBgap -0.01· vwapΔ -0.22 · retr 68%/78%max closed +0.22 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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