Mountain Frog Research

Sessions most like 2026-09-02, as of 11:30 ET

An unbroken morning drive that stamped its high right at the cutoff and has held there.

What would separate them: The cleanest observable split is what the next pullback does: the sessions that carried on barely traded back down into the morning's value area, while those that faded dug deep into the morning's advance and kept working lower from there. Watch too whether afternoon ranges build above the cutoff high or merely overlap the morning's, and whether the heavier volume arrives on the pushes up or on the giveback.

What links these sessions is not their range — the match selects for that — but their posture into the cutoff: pushed up and away from the open, sitting near the highs, with much thinner pullbacks than the corpus shows by late morning. Today's volatility backdrop is at the quiet end of that group and under the corpus median, while participation is ordinary, sitting right at the corpus median, so this is not a thin-tape drift. Against the group itself today sits comfortably inside rather than at an edge: the giveback so far is about what these sessions were carrying at this hour, with today's high printed moments before the cutoff.

Pressed on higher 5 of 12

These carried the morning drive through the afternoon, with pullbacks that stayed brief and minor. They closed up near the strong end of the day's range.

new high 5 new low 0 median to close +0.42 ATR
Turned and faded 3 of 12

These either poked marginally above the morning high or failed to make further upward progress, then rolled over and spent the afternoon unwinding the morning's advance. They closed well below where they stood at the cutoff, the deepest of them giving the morning's gains back in full.

new high 2 new low 0 median to close -0.40 ATR
Round trip, unresolved 4 of 12

These probed and came back, or slid and rebuilt, but ended the session close to where they were trading at the cutoff. The afternoon covered ground in each direction without settling anywhere new.

new high 4 new low 0 median to close +0.04 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.

2026-09-02 — TODAY vwap +0.47· hi +0.93 @11:28 · IBgap +0.39· vwapΔ +0.50 · retr 3%/14%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
11 of 12 expanded upward
after the cutoff, by which extremes they took
Room past the level
+0.31 ATR
median run from the cutoff price · +0.26 ATR beyond the morning high itself
Heat before it got there
-0.09 ATR
worst excursion against you between the cutoff and the extreme — not the whole session · worst -0.47 ATR · typically reached 14:40
What would catch it off guard
1 did something else
1 stayed in balance · worst close -0.40 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
2026-09-02 — today0.0043.20.910.993%14%in progress
2026-06-260.6673.01.040.900%17%-0.83+0.26-0.99YES
2023-08-290.7144.00.831.012%6%+0.52+0.59-0.01YES
2024-04-030.7435.00.860.885%6%-0.40+0.04-0.89
2023-01-230.8858.50.651.2323%24%-0.05+0.31-0.37YES
2026-05-280.9655.50.880.966%13%+0.15+0.23-0.05YES
2023-06-150.9938.00.921.221%12%+0.51+0.85-0.18YES
2023-10-101.0447.80.581.077%14%-0.40+0.18-0.45YES
2026-08-031.1166.80.861.019%11%+0.38+0.52-0.01YES
2025-09-111.1740.50.670.914%24%+0.04+0.23-0.20YES
2025-02-041.1954.80.710.812%15%-0.05+0.06-0.47YES
2024-11-191.1947.20.521.042%11%+0.29+0.47-0.18YES
2024-08-081.2365.80.961.2915%16%+0.42+0.53-0.19YES
cohort low35.00.520.810%6%-0.83+0.04-0.99
cohort median54.80.861.015%14%+0.15+0.31-0.19
cohort high73.01.041.2923%24%+0.52+0.85-0.01
cohort hit rate11/120/12
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.

2026-06-26 d=0.66 vwap +0.47· hi +0.82 @11:29 · IBgap +0.49· vwapΔ +0.43 · retr 0%/17%max closed -0.83 ATR
2023-08-29 d=0.71 vwap +0.39· hi +0.98 @11:26 · IBgap +0.27· vwapΔ +0.56 · retr 2%/6%max closed +0.52 ATR
2024-04-03 d=0.74 vwap +0.34· hi +0.94 @11:22 · IBgap +0.28· vwapΔ +0.48 · retr 5%/6%max closed -0.40 ATR
2023-01-23 d=0.88 vwap +0.31· hi +0.93 @11:20 · IBgap +0.31· vwapΔ +0.49 · retr 23%/24%max closed -0.05 ATR
2026-05-28 d=0.96 vwap +0.38· hi +0.73 @11:29 · IBgap +0.35· vwapΔ +0.34 · retr 6%/13%max closed +0.15 ATR
2023-06-15 d=0.99 vwap +0.55· hi +1.20 @11:29 · IBgap +0.36· vwapΔ +0.60 · retr 1%/12%max closed +0.51 ATR
2023-10-10 d=1.04 vwap +0.38· hi +0.78 @11:15 · IBgap +0.27· vwapΔ +0.34 · retr 7%/14%max closed -0.40 ATR
2026-08-03 d=1.11 vwap +0.27· hi +0.94 @11:24 · IBgap +0.22· vwapΔ +0.48 · retr 9%/11%max closed +0.38 ATR
2025-09-11 d=1.17 vwap +0.41· hi +0.85 @11:18 · IBgap +0.18· vwapΔ +0.36 · retr 4%/24%max closed +0.04 ATR
2025-02-04 d=1.19 vwap +0.38· hi +0.78 @11:29 · IBgap +0.18· vwapΔ +0.40 · retr 2%/15%max closed -0.05 ATR
2024-11-19 d=1.19 vwap +0.58· hi +0.90 @11:29 · IBgap +0.24· vwapΔ +0.26 · retr 2%/11%max closed +0.29 ATR
2024-08-08 d=1.23 vwap +0.32· hi +0.71 @11:27 · IBgap +0.44· vwapΔ +0.31 · retr 15%/16%max closed +0.42 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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