Mountain Frog Research

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

A morning spent mostly beneath the open that has worked back to a marginal high late, with very little given back since.

What would separate them: The separation between these paths shows up in observable form: whether the late-morning high just above the open is taken out or rejected on the attempt, whether the morning low holds when it is approached, and whether the pullback deepens past the depth it has held to so far. Volume building into the afternoon rather than draining away is the other marker worth tracking.

What these sessions share is a morning that had reached its extreme by the cutoff without surrendering much of it: the pullback from the extreme is slight next to a typical session in the corpus, and the extreme itself is still close at hand. Participation varied across the group, from thin to heavy, so volume is not the common thread, though the group's median runs heavier than the corpus norm. Today sits inside the group on the give-back but outside it on range, with a daily range narrower than any session in the cohort and narrower than the corpus median, making this the quietest tape of the set. Volume is running near the corpus median rather than the group's heavier middle, and the initial balance is toward the wide end of the cohort while unremarkable against the corpus at large.

Pushed higher 4 of 12

These worked away from the cutoff price to the upside and closed toward the top of their afternoon range. Where they dipped beneath the cutoff price, the dip was recovered and left behind.

new high 0 new low 3 median to close +0.28 ATR
Broke lower 4 of 12

These gave up the cutoff price and pressed well beneath it through the rest of the session, closing near the bottom of their afternoon range. Attempts back upward after the cutoff were slight or absent.

new high 0 new low 4 median to close -0.36 ATR
Round trip 3 of 12

Each made a genuine excursion after the cutoff, upward in most and downward in the rest, then came back and closed within a hair of where it stood at the cutoff. The move was there while it lasted, but the close kept no record of it.

new high 0 new low 2 median to close -0.01 ATR
Went nowhere 1 of 12

This session went quiet after the cutoff, with travel in either direction staying tight and the close resting on the cutoff price. There was no excursion to give back.

new high 0 new low 1 median to close +0.01 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.

2026-09-09 — TODAY vwap -0.36· hi +0.10 @11:00 · IBgap +0.01· vwapΔ -0.15 · retr 20%/21%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 downward
after the cutoff, by which extremes they took
Room past the level
-0.22 ATR
median run from the cutoff price
Heat before it got there
+0.09 ATR
worst excursion against you between the cutoff and the extreme — not the whole session · worst +0.31 ATR · typically reached 13:50
What would catch it off guard
2 did something else
2 stayed in balance · worst close +0.28 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
2026-09-09 — today0.0043.20.451.0220%21%in progress
2022-11-291.0054.20.331.0017%25%+0.28+0.43-0.05
2025-03-131.07101.20.461.083%29%-0.27+0.09-0.46YES
2025-12-021.0887.00.221.1615%40%+0.17+0.33-0.08YES
2023-02-081.2158.00.311.3014%31%-0.01+0.31-0.15YES
2024-10-211.3345.00.240.835%12%+0.66+0.68-0.05YES
2026-04-211.3472.50.351.0613%50%-0.36+0.17-0.57YES
2026-05-271.4261.00.350.9832%34%+0.19+0.27-0.22YES
2025-11-131.4360.00.561.3914%18%-0.61+0.15-0.88YES
2023-01-181.4553.80.331.3010%20%-0.72+0.00-0.77YES
2026-08-141.5068.80.250.6715%16%+0.01+0.08-0.12YES
2023-01-051.5157.00.531.2417%26%+0.02+0.43-0.07
2023-04-041.5460.00.331.2719%26%-0.03+0.07-0.28YES
cohort low45.00.220.673%12%-0.72+0.00-0.88
cohort median60.00.331.1615%26%+0.01+0.27-0.15
cohort high101.20.561.3932%50%+0.66+0.68-0.05
cohort hit rate0/1210/12
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.

2022-11-29 d=1.00 vwap -0.35· hi +0.24 @10:30 · IBgap +0.09· vwapΔ -0.06 · retr 17%/25%max closed +0.28 ATR
2025-03-13 d=1.07 vwap -0.23· hi +0.06 @10:25 · IBgap -0.02· vwapΔ -0.13 · retr 3%/29%max closed -0.27 ATR
2025-12-02 d=1.08 vwap -0.25· hi +0.22 @11:04 · IBgap -0.09· vwapΔ +0.03 · retr 15%/40%max closed +0.17 ATR
2023-02-08 d=1.21 vwap -0.36· hi +0.25 @10:19 · IBgap -0.06· vwapΔ -0.05 · retr 14%/31%max closed -0.01 ATR
2024-10-21 d=1.33 vwap -0.50· hi +0.22 @10:17 · IBgap -0.05· vwapΔ -0.23 · retr 5%/12%max closed +0.66 ATR
2026-04-21 d=1.34 vwap -0.33· hi +0.14 @10:15 · IBgap +0.09· vwapΔ -0.09 · retr 13%/50%max closed -0.36 ATR
2026-05-27 d=1.42 vwap -0.12· hi +0.08 @10:20 · IBgap -0.06· vwapΔ -0.10 · retr 32%/34%max closed +0.19 ATR
2025-11-13 d=1.43 vwap -0.36· hi +0.05 @10:16 · IBgap -0.01· vwapΔ -0.41 · retr 14%/18%max closed -0.61 ATR
2023-01-18 d=1.45 vwap -0.52· hi +0.21 @10:08 · IBgap +0.04· vwapΔ -0.18 · retr 10%/20%max closed -0.72 ATR
2026-08-14 d=1.50 vwap -0.19· hi +0.04 @10:08 · IBgap -0.09· vwapΔ -0.09 · retr 15%/16%max closed +0.01 ATR
2023-01-05 d=1.51 vwap -0.15· hi +0.01 @10:08 · IBgap +0.05· vwapΔ -0.16 · retr 17%/26%max closed +0.02 ATR
2023-04-04 d=1.54 vwap -0.26· hi +0.05 @10:01 · IBgap -0.11· vwapΔ -0.17 · retr 19%/26%max closed -0.03 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).