Mountain Frog Research

Sessions most like 2026-09-18, as of 11:30 ET

An early-high morning whose sell-off has been bought back to the middle of its range on light tape.

What would separate them: Whether the bounce can push through the morning high on this light tape, or stops at VWAP and rolls back toward the initial-balance low; and if the low does break, whether the break attracts volume or is bought back quickly as it was in the recovery camp.

The matcher picked sessions that set their high moments after the open, drove lower through the initial balance, and had recovered a meaningful chunk of that drive by late morning; the width of the balance is what the tool selects for, not a finding. Today sits at the further-retraced end of the group, with the bounce currently near its own high-water mark and price parked on VWAP. Volume is the outlier: lighter than the corpus median and lighter than most of the cohort, and the day's range so far is at the narrow end of the group.

Retrace carried through 3 of 12

The afternoon kept climbing, took out the pre-drive extreme, and the drive side was never seriously revisited; closes came in well above the cutoff.

new high 3 new low 0 median to close +0.31 ATR
Drive resumed 4 of 12

The bounce ran out of buyers, the drive extreme gave way, and the session closed in the drive direction — in the worst case a long way further, with the retrace looking in hindsight like the pause before the bigger leg.

new high 0 new low 4 median to close -0.66 ATR
Broke, then recovered 3 of 12

The drive extreme was taken out first, but the break did not hold: price reversed and clawed back most or more of the damage, with the close landing back near or above the cutoff level and the strongest of the group also printing a fresh extreme on the retrace side.

new high 1 new low 3 median to close +0.23 ATR
Stayed inside range 2 of 12

Neither morning extreme was tested again; the afternoon drifted, in opposite directions across the group, and settled without resolving the balance.

new high 0 new low 0 median to close +0.20 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.

2026-09-18 — TODAY vwap +0.02· hi +0.11 @09:32 · IBgap -0.12· vwapΔ -0.39 · retr 46%/49%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
6 of 12 expanded downward
after the cutoff, by which extremes they took
Room past the level
-0.75 ATR
median run from the cutoff price
Heat before it got there
+0.16 ATR
worst excursion against you between the cutoff and the extreme — not the whole session · worst +0.27 ATR · typically reached 16:00
What would catch it off guard
6 did something else
3 expanded upward, 2 stayed in balance, 1 went both ways · worst close +0.87 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
2026-09-18 — today0.0039.20.800.8346%49%in progress
2024-07-010.4938.20.881.1754%55%+0.31+0.46-0.15YES
2025-05-290.6161.80.770.8648%56%-0.12+0.02-0.76YES
2023-05-100.6741.00.761.3647%51%+0.23+0.48-0.75YES
2023-08-080.7329.50.961.3233%37%+0.87+1.04-0.24YES
2024-12-090.7341.00.420.9938%42%-0.27+0.16-0.41YES
2025-07-150.7540.50.670.9235%38%-0.77+0.07-0.77YES
2024-06-130.7738.20.730.9632%33%+0.32+0.56-0.41YESYES
2025-03-120.77101.20.521.3538%42%+0.20+0.50-0.03
2025-12-150.7871.20.950.8553%58%-0.29+0.02-0.48
2025-07-220.8239.50.770.9051%71%+0.30+0.51-0.16YES
2025-12-310.8248.00.540.5430%30%-0.66+0.25-0.69YES
2024-05-230.8535.51.011.4139%43%-1.31+0.27-1.67YES
cohort low29.50.420.5430%30%-1.31+0.02-1.67
cohort median41.00.770.9939%43%+0.20+0.46-0.41
cohort high101.21.011.4154%71%+0.87+1.04-0.03
cohort hit rate4/127/12
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.

2024-07-01 d=0.49 vwap +0.03· hi +0.06 @09:31 · IBgap -0.03· vwapΔ -0.41 · retr 54%/55%max closed +0.31 ATR
2025-05-29 d=0.61 vwap +0.03· hi +0.02 @09:30 · IBgap -0.08· vwapΔ -0.27 · retr 48%/56%max closed -0.12 ATR
2023-05-10 d=0.67 vwap -0.08· hi +0.16 @09:32 · IBgap -0.21· vwapΔ -0.48 · retr 47%/51%max closed +0.23 ATR
2023-08-08 d=0.73 vwap -0.04· hi +0.03 @09:30 · IBgap -0.11· vwapΔ -0.52 · retr 33%/37%max closed +0.87 ATR
2024-12-09 d=0.73 vwap -0.13· hi +0.04 @09:33 · IBgap -0.17· vwapΔ -0.31 · retr 38%/42%max closed -0.27 ATR
2025-07-15 d=0.75 vwap -0.12· hi +0.09 @09:30 · IBgap -0.05· vwapΔ -0.47 · retr 35%/38%max closed -0.77 ATR
2024-06-13 d=0.77 vwap -0.09· hi +0.01 @09:30 · IBgap -0.17· vwapΔ -0.33 · retr 32%/33%max closed +0.32 ATR
2025-03-12 d=0.77 vwap -0.18· hi +0.09 @09:32 · IBgap -0.12· vwapΔ -0.38 · retr 38%/42%max closed +0.20 ATR
2025-12-15 d=0.78 vwap +0.10· hi +0.01 @09:30 · IBgap -0.23· vwapΔ -0.44 · retr 53%/58%max closed -0.29 ATR
2025-07-22 d=0.82 vwap +0.04· hi +0.03 @09:39 · IBgap -0.04· vwapΔ -0.27 · retr 51%/71%max closed +0.30 ATR
2025-12-31 d=0.82 vwap -0.09· hi +0.05 @09:30 · IBgap -0.04· vwapΔ -0.34 · retr 30%/30%max closed -0.66 ATR
2024-05-23 d=0.85 vwap -0.01· hi +0.02 @09:30 · IBgap +0.02· vwapΔ -0.50 · retr 39%/43%max closed -1.31 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).