Mountain Frog Research

Sessions most like 2026-09-01, as of 11:30 ET

A mid-morning high that has been leaking back into the range since, on quieter-than-typical participation.

What would separate them: The observable split is whether the morning high is approached on expanding volume or on fading volume, and whether the low of the current pullback holds when it is revisited. Acceptance beneath the opening range, rather than a quick probe that gets rejected, would mark the split toward the group that broke lower.

What links these sessions is not the wide opening balance the matcher selects for, but the shape after it: a high set early, then a pullback into value that was already well advanced by the cutoff. Today sits deeper than most of them on how much of the morning push was surrendered at its worst, and it has clawed part of that back to arrive at the cutoff around the middle of the cohort. The clearest gap is participation, running lighter than the corpus median and on the quiet side of this group, alongside an average range narrower than typical. Nothing in the pre-cutoff picture separates the sessions below from each other; that separation happened afterward.

Resumed the drive 4 of 12

These reclaimed the morning high and kept going, so the late-morning pullback turned out to be the deepest give-back of the day. Downside after the cutoff was minor and most closed toward the upper end of the day.

new high 4 new low 0 median to close +0.44 ATR
Rotation, no resolution 4 of 12

These worked either side of the cutoff level for the rest of the day, some tagging a marginal new high that drew no follow-through, and finished close to where they stood at late morning. Excursions in either direction stayed shallow.

new high 3 new low 0 median to close +0.22 ATR
Gave way lower 4 of 12

Here the give-back did not stop at the morning range: sellers carried price through the lows and closes landed at or near the session bottom. In part of this group the turn came only after a brief probe above the morning high.

new high 1 new low 4 median to close -0.51 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.

2026-09-01 — TODAY vwap +0.15· hi +0.60 @10:35 · IBgap +0.26· vwapΔ +0.28 · retr 39%/74%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
7 of 12 expanded upward
after the cutoff, by which extremes they took
Room past the level
+0.49 ATR
median run from the cutoff price · +0.30 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 -0.26 ATR · typically reached 15:35
What would catch it off guard
5 did something else
3 expanded downward, 1 stayed in balance, 1 went both ways · worst close -1.37 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
2026-09-01 — today0.0043.20.670.9439%74%in progress
2024-10-290.5745.00.770.8340%77%+0.17+0.42-0.07YES
2025-08-080.7045.80.670.8436%51%+0.26+0.37-0.26YES
2024-05-290.7233.50.481.0251%78%-0.07+0.25-0.25
2023-01-130.7757.20.581.0625%45%+0.44+0.55-0.14YES
2025-06-120.8058.50.540.8433%58%+0.22+0.22-0.12YES
2026-01-200.8045.00.691.3628%67%-1.37+0.12-1.63YES
2024-02-220.8139.20.621.2219%70%+0.54+0.80-0.13YES
2023-11-010.8255.00.531.1756%63%+0.42+0.57-0.24YES
2022-10-200.8374.20.781.5750%60%-0.67+0.15-0.78YES
2023-06-300.8434.20.661.0332%68%+0.15+0.49-0.21YES
2024-06-120.8438.20.711.0131%60%-0.51+0.22-0.78YESYES
2025-06-180.8558.00.650.6438%46%-0.47+0.16-0.63YES
cohort low33.50.480.6419%45%-1.37+0.12-1.63
cohort median45.80.661.0336%63%+0.17+0.37-0.24
cohort high74.20.781.5756%78%+0.54+0.80-0.07
cohort hit rate8/124/12
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.

2024-10-29 d=0.57 vwap +0.17· hi +0.45 @10:26 · IBgap +0.24· vwapΔ +0.24 · retr 40%/77%max closed +0.17 ATR
2025-08-08 d=0.70 vwap +0.04· hi +0.66 @10:34 · IBgap +0.24· vwapΔ +0.33 · retr 36%/51%max closed +0.26 ATR
2024-05-29 d=0.72 vwap +0.05· hi +0.49 @10:38 · IBgap +0.24· vwapΔ +0.18 · retr 51%/78%max closed -0.07 ATR
2023-01-13 d=0.77 vwap +0.12· hi +0.57 @10:30 · IBgap +0.26· vwapΔ +0.23 · retr 25%/45%max closed +0.44 ATR
2025-06-12 d=0.80 vwap +0.11· hi +0.62 @11:02 · IBgap +0.32· vwapΔ +0.30 · retr 33%/58%max closed +0.22 ATR
2026-01-20 d=0.80 vwap +0.23· hi +0.73 @10:42 · IBgap +0.24· vwapΔ +0.15 · retr 28%/67%max closed -1.37 ATR
2024-02-22 d=0.81 vwap +0.18· hi +0.44 @10:35 · IBgap +0.33· vwapΔ +0.31 · retr 19%/70%max closed +0.54 ATR
2023-11-01 d=0.82 vwap +0.02· hi +0.49 @10:46 · IBgap +0.27· vwapΔ +0.24 · retr 56%/63%max closed +0.42 ATR
2022-10-20 d=0.83 vwap +0.00· hi +0.64 @10:20 · IBgap +0.31· vwapΔ +0.29 · retr 50%/60%max closed -0.67 ATR
2023-06-30 d=0.84 vwap +0.06· hi +0.56 @10:20 · IBgap +0.12· vwapΔ +0.30 · retr 32%/68%max closed +0.15 ATR
2024-06-12 d=0.84 vwap +0.12· hi +0.61 @10:33 · IBgap +0.41· vwapΔ +0.35 · retr 31%/60%max closed -0.51 ATR
2025-06-18 d=0.85 vwap +0.08· hi +0.50 @10:34 · IBgap +0.34· vwapΔ +0.32 · retr 38%/46%max closed -0.47 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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