Mountain Frog Research

Sessions most like 2026-09-21, as of 11:30 ET

A steady drive higher on light tape that has given back almost nothing, with the session high printed just before the cutoff.

What would separate them: Whether a push above the morning high after the cutoff gets accepted and built on or is sold straight away, and how deep the give-back runs relative to the morning's range and VWAP. The camps overlap on how they looked at the cutoff, including retrace and relative volume, so the separation only shows up in what the afternoon does.

The match pulled mornings that drove away from the open and were still holding near the extreme at the cutoff with a retrace far below the corpus figure for this time of day, so that shared shape is the selection, not a discovery. Where today differs is participation: relative volume is lighter than any analog and lighter than the corpus median, so this drive has been built on less volume than any session it is being compared with. Today's range is also at the narrow end of the cohort, while on the retrace itself it sits in the middle of the group.

Resumed the drive 4 of 12

Pushed on to fresh highs after the cutoff and closed near the top of the day. Most did it with little give-back; the session that had already retraced the most by the cutoff also traded well below the cutoff level at some point before finishing near the high.

new high 4 new low 0 median to close +0.48 ATR
Poked then chopped 5 of 12

Printed a marginal new high after the cutoff but could not build on it, drifting up and down through the afternoon and closing close to where they stood at the cutoff. Some dipped meaningfully in between before settling back.

new high 5 new low 0 median to close -0.04 ATR
Rolled over 3 of 12

Gave the morning back and closed well below the cutoff level. Most managed a marginal new high before reversing hard; the exception never got above the morning high.

new high 2 new low 0 median to close -0.40 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.

2026-09-21 — TODAY vwap +0.36· hi +0.91 @11:19 · IBgap +0.36· vwapΔ +0.43 · retr 9%/11%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
+0.26 ATR
median run from the cutoff price · +0.19 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
2026-09-21 — today0.0043.20.760.769%11%in progress
2024-04-030.4535.00.860.885%6%-0.40+0.04-0.89
2023-01-230.5558.50.651.2323%24%-0.05+0.31-0.37YES
2023-10-100.7047.80.581.077%14%-0.40+0.18-0.45YES
2023-08-290.7244.00.831.012%6%+0.52+0.59-0.01YES
2026-05-280.7455.50.880.966%13%+0.15+0.23-0.05YES
2026-08-030.7866.80.861.019%11%+0.38+0.52-0.01YES
2026-06-260.8673.01.040.900%17%-0.83+0.26-0.99YES
2024-08-080.9465.80.961.2915%16%+0.42+0.53-0.19YES
2025-09-110.9540.50.670.914%24%+0.04+0.23-0.20YES
2025-02-040.9954.80.710.812%15%-0.05+0.06-0.47YES
2023-05-181.0241.00.551.0021%33%+0.48+0.59-0.46YES
2022-12-211.0457.00.441.0021%31%-0.04+0.17-0.22YES
cohort low35.00.440.810%6%-0.83+0.04-0.99
cohort median55.50.831.007%16%+0.04+0.26-0.22
cohort high73.01.041.2923%33%+0.52+0.59-0.01
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.

2024-04-03 d=0.45 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=0.55 vwap +0.31· hi +0.93 @11:20 · IBgap +0.31· vwapΔ +0.49 · retr 23%/24%max closed -0.05 ATR
2023-10-10 d=0.70 vwap +0.38· hi +0.78 @11:15 · IBgap +0.27· vwapΔ +0.34 · retr 7%/14%max closed -0.40 ATR
2023-08-29 d=0.72 vwap +0.39· hi +0.98 @11:26 · IBgap +0.27· vwapΔ +0.56 · retr 2%/6%max closed +0.52 ATR
2026-05-28 d=0.74 vwap +0.38· hi +0.73 @11:29 · IBgap +0.35· vwapΔ +0.34 · retr 6%/13%max closed +0.15 ATR
2026-08-03 d=0.78 vwap +0.27· hi +0.94 @11:24 · IBgap +0.22· vwapΔ +0.48 · retr 9%/11%max closed +0.38 ATR
2026-06-26 d=0.86 vwap +0.47· hi +0.82 @11:29 · IBgap +0.49· vwapΔ +0.43 · retr 0%/17%max closed -0.83 ATR
2024-08-08 d=0.94 vwap +0.32· hi +0.71 @11:27 · IBgap +0.44· vwapΔ +0.31 · retr 15%/16%max closed +0.42 ATR
2025-09-11 d=0.95 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=0.99 vwap +0.38· hi +0.78 @11:29 · IBgap +0.18· vwapΔ +0.40 · retr 2%/15%max closed -0.05 ATR
2023-05-18 d=1.02 vwap +0.22· hi +0.75 @11:03 · IBgap +0.33· vwapΔ +0.38 · retr 21%/33%max closed +0.48 ATR
2022-12-21 d=1.04 vwap +0.24· hi +0.71 @11:10 · IBgap +0.29· vwapΔ +0.36 · retr 21%/31%max closed -0.04 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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