The objective of the trend follower is to employ discipline to offset biases in order to extract signals from prices to the exclusion of other information. In fact, this has greater similarity to a statistical or engineering problem than to a finance problem. Because prices are surrounded by or filled with noise, trend following is a form of price smoothing. You eliminate the noise to obtain a clearer signal. It also can be thought of as a filtering problem. You throw out the excess information that may be associated with trades that are not driving the trend signal.