Glossary / Trend & momentum
Trend
A trend describes the direction price has generally travelled over an extended window, and how consistently it has travelled that way. It is a statement about a period of price history rather than about any single session.
How it is measured
How is trend measured?
The two common approaches are a price change over a multi-month lookback, and the position of the current price inside a longer high-to-low range. Chart-based methods add moving averages or successive highs and lows, but every method reduces to arithmetic on prices that have already printed.
Why it matters
Why does trend matter to a swing trader?
Trend is the longest-memory of the common measurements, which makes it the steadiest and the slowest. Swing traders use it as context for shorter signals: the same short-horizon reading means something different inside a multi-month advance than inside a multi-month decline. Because it is backward-looking by construction, a trend reading is a description of the past and carries no information about valuation, solvency, or what the company does.
In Tapeline
Does Tapeline use trend?
Price trend is one of the checks in the Tapeline score. It looks at whether a price has been going up or down over the last few months.
Related
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General information about market vocabulary, written to be descriptive rather than prescriptive. Not investment advice — see the risk disclosure.