Mountain Frog Research

Sessions most like 2026-09-22, as of 11:30 ET

An early-high morning whose opening push has been handed back in full, with price still at the far end of that give-back as midday arrives.

What would separate them: Price sits beneath VWAP at or near the low end of the morning's give-back, so the observable questions are whether VWAP and the opening area get reclaimed from below, and whether trade continues beneath the morning's lows or gets rejected away from them. Whether the afternoon produces much excursion is the other axis — this group separates on movement versus stasis as much as it separates on direction.

What these sessions share is not how they looked at the open so much as the thoroughness of the give-back: each pushed up off the open, then surrendered that move and kept going, trading back through the opening area instead of holding above it. Beyond that the group is a mixed bag — sleepy tape and frantic tape, wide days and tight days — which says the match is about where price ended up, not about how much was going on while it got there. Today sits at the deepest end of the group's give-back, tied with the furthest of them rather than beyond. It is also a lighter session than a typical day in the corpus, with a daily range near the middle of the group and an early balance toward its narrow end.

Bid into close 4 of 12

These closed above where they stood at the cutoff, with the upside excursion outweighing whatever the downside managed. In the strongest case the recovery carried through the morning high; in the milder cases it was a lean rather than a drive, and some marked a fresh low for the day before the lift.

new high 1 new low 2 median to close +0.44 ATR
Flushed then repaired 2 of 12

The give-back ran much deeper into the afternoon here, among the widest downside excursions in the group, yet the close landed back near the cutoff level. The weakest prices of the day were not where these sessions finished.

new high 0 new low 2 median to close +0.07 ATR
Kept selling 2 of 12

These finished near the weakest prices of the day, with the close and the downside extreme sitting close together, which places the low late in the session. Within this group the tape at times ran to a fresh session high along the way before finishing near its low, so the path was violent even where the outcome was simply lower.

new high 1 new low 2 median to close -0.49 ATR
Drifted in place 4 of 12

The afternoon added little: closes landed within a whisker of the cutoff level, and whatever excursion the afternoon produced was given back by the bell. Some of these poked at the day's edges without the probe amounting to anything.

new high 1 new low 4 median to close -0.02 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.

2026-09-22 — TODAY vwap -0.13· hi +0.26 @09:35 · IBgap -0.23· vwapΔ -0.14 · retr 150%/150%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
8 of 12 expanded downward
after the cutoff, by which extremes they took
Room past the level
-0.23 ATR
median run from the cutoff price
Heat before it got there
+0.17 ATR
worst excursion against you between the cutoff and the extreme — not the whole session · worst +0.54 ATR · typically reached 13:55
What would catch it off guard
4 did something else
2 went both ways, 1 expanded upward, 1 stayed in balance · worst close +0.47 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
2026-09-22 — today0.0043.50.390.82150%150%in progress
2022-11-280.5653.50.380.85133%150%-0.49+0.17-0.64YES
2023-10-300.7557.50.491.43136%150%+0.47+0.67-0.05YES
2024-08-200.8160.50.350.77150%150%+0.11+0.30-0.11YES
2026-03-170.8184.20.350.79137%141%-0.10+0.09-0.19YES
2023-12-140.8727.20.721.26145%150%+0.07+0.54-0.99YES
2025-07-090.9042.80.501.05136%150%+0.44+0.50-0.19
2023-05-030.9939.00.370.88150%150%-0.69+0.84-0.75YESYES
2024-07-091.0135.00.360.75130%150%-0.06+0.34-0.16YESYES
2025-12-261.0448.00.440.48140%150%+0.02+0.05-0.21YES
2026-07-021.1792.20.461.36150%150%-0.03+0.20-0.54YES
2025-12-291.1848.00.510.68124%147%+0.17+0.32-0.23YES
2024-07-081.2335.00.310.66109%150%-0.02+0.03-0.37YES
cohort low27.20.310.48109%141%-0.69+0.03-0.99
cohort median48.00.440.85137%150%+0.02+0.32-0.21
cohort high92.20.721.43150%150%+0.47+0.84-0.05
cohort hit rate3/1210/12
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.

2022-11-28 d=0.56 vwap -0.18· hi +0.32 @09:35 · IBgap -0.20· vwapΔ -0.06 · retr 133%/150%max closed -0.49 ATR
2023-10-30 d=0.75 vwap -0.15· hi +0.32 @09:56 · IBgap -0.26· vwapΔ -0.04 · retr 136%/150%max closed +0.47 ATR
2024-08-20 d=0.81 vwap -0.20· hi +0.29 @09:57 · IBgap -0.13· vwapΔ -0.05 · retr 150%/150%max closed +0.11 ATR
2026-03-17 d=0.81 vwap -0.16· hi +0.25 @09:46 · IBgap -0.14· vwapΔ +0.00 · retr 137%/141%max closed -0.10 ATR
2023-12-14 d=0.87 vwap -0.23· hi +0.47 @09:47 · IBgap -0.25· vwapΔ -0.22 · retr 145%/150%max closed +0.07 ATR
2025-07-09 d=0.90 vwap -0.20· hi +0.47 @09:50 · IBgap -0.23· vwapΔ -0.06 · retr 136%/150%max closed +0.44 ATR
2023-05-03 d=0.99 vwap -0.20· hi +0.33 @09:52 · IBgap -0.07· vwapΔ -0.02 · retr 150%/150%max closed -0.69 ATR
2024-07-09 d=1.01 vwap -0.09· hi +0.19 @10:00 · IBgap -0.18· vwapΔ +0.01 · retr 130%/150%max closed -0.06 ATR
2025-12-26 d=1.04 vwap -0.08· hi +0.22 @09:46 · IBgap -0.06· vwapΔ -0.00 · retr 140%/150%max closed +0.02 ATR
2026-07-02 d=1.17 vwap -0.35· hi +0.42 @09:52 · IBgap -0.24· vwapΔ +0.01 · retr 150%/150%max closed -0.03 ATR
2025-12-29 d=1.18 vwap -0.12· hi +0.34 @09:37 · IBgap -0.06· vwapΔ +0.02 · retr 124%/147%max closed +0.17 ATR
2024-07-08 d=1.23 vwap -0.06· hi +0.24 @09:51 · IBgap -0.13· vwapΔ -0.05 · retr 109%/150%max closed -0.02 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).