Trend

A trend is a metric's overall, persistent direction of movement over time, apart from short-term day-to-day swings.

A trend is about direction, not a point: its question is not 'how many today' but 'which way are we heading'. The greatest skill in reading a trend is separating signal from noise; the human mind hunts for patterns and sees a trend even in random swings. Three common deceptions live here: reading a two-day jump as a trend (usually just reversion to the mean), ignoring seasonality (every weekend's dip is not a downtrend), and picking a range that shows the desired trend. So a trend should be read over a long-enough range, ideally with a smoothing line like a moving average, not from two points. A trend without context also misleads: 10% growth when the whole market grew 30% is really a loss of share.