Trend Micro can definitely be trusted, a lot of large businesses trust Trend Micro. The company through the years remained rather professional, away from “beefs” with other vendors and participated on almost all tests regardless of the outcome. Many other vendors had drama with testing bodies.
The downside of Trend Micro is the home version is in no way a priority to them. Development is rather slow (not too active) and even the engines don’t evolve quickly. For example their antivirus engine was last updated a year ago (release notes are in Asian).
success.trendmicro.com
The changelog of home products is not impressive and some issues have been around for a while, still hindering unfixed. The random mute mode is an example. Performance-wise it’s so-so, for example on app launch their engine goes up to 1/4 of CPU time (25%) and apps launch rather slowly. Even when used again and again. They don’t seem to be interested in improving the home products, they are a business-first vendor.
Even for businesses, their TippingPoint IPS for example is not in the league of Symantec, Check Point and others. Updates are rather infrequent and coverage of vulnerabilities and other problems is not as wide, whilst the appliance itself is not cheap.