ELI5: Explain Like I'm 5

Detrended price oscillator

Hey kiddo! Have you ever heard of something called the detrended price oscillator? It's a tool that helps people understand the price of things, like stocks or other investments, by taking away the trend, or the general direction that the price is going.

Let me explain it like this: imagine you have a toy car that you like to play with every day. Sometimes you push it really hard and it goes fast, and other times you push it gently and it goes slow. But if you put it on a track or a ramp that is sloping upward, the car will naturally go faster and faster as it goes up the slope. That's because the slope is the trend, or the direction that the car is moving.

Now imagine that you want to know how fast the toy car is going, but you don't want the slope of the track to affect your measurement. How can you do that? Well, one way is to detach the car from the track and put it on a flat surface. Then you can push it at different speeds and measure how fast it goes without the slope affecting it.

That's kind of what the detrended price oscillator does. It takes away the slope, or trend, of the price of an investment, so you can see how it's performing without being influenced by whether it's going up or down overall. It does this by comparing the current price to an average of past prices over a certain period of time.

So, let's say you're looking at a chart of a stock's price over the past year. The detrended price oscillator would take out the overall trend of whether the stock is going up or down, and instead show you how the stock is performing compared to its average price over the past few months. This can help you see if the stock is overvalued (priced higher than it has been historically) or undervalued (priced lower than it has been historically).

Pretty cool, huh? The detrended price oscillator can be a useful tool for people who want to understand investments and make better decisions about when to buy or sell.