In this weekly article I’ll discuss a selection of players on my watchlist and give status updates on my new 1K New Trader Challenge. *Note, weeks 3-6 missing because of the international break, + instead of saving week 4 I over-wrote it, oops*.

£1k New Trader Challenge – Week 7

In this new weekly feature I have started fresh with a £1k balance on day one of the new season.

The aim is to see how I get on when facing the same challenges that a new trader would. I won’t have any help from the Summer bonus or the benefit of being able to work months ahead of the market. We’ll get there eventually, but we all have to start somewhere.

I’ll be trying to show not just the trades but my thought process and reasons behind decisions I make. The specific players I pick are less important.

For new readers, you can check out the original post where I introduce my overall strategy and explain the opening selections.

As I obviously have an existing portfolio, I will not make these exact trades but they will be tracked realistically. I will also own every player on this list for real so the selections will get my full attention.

I always say though, don’t blindly follow any picks you see from others including mine. Do your own research and if you see what I see, great, but you have to know why you have bought the player and be happy with it.

The 1K Challenge Portfolio

Portfolio Value: £1249.45
In the bank: £15.70
Value Increase from £1k: 26.5%
Value Change from last time:14.05%

Portfolio Performance

Due to holidays and various things like the new bonus it has been a couple of weeks since I last updated the Challenge.

We’ve continued to do well, and got a nice little bump from last week’s bonus too. You have to be happy with a 26.5% profit if starting on Day 1 of the new season. And for a new trader, hopefully you’d be building confidence and knowledge by now.

It’s not actually a portfolio that is particularly well placed to benefit from bonuses. We aren’t holding the big ticket premium players like Pogba and Hazard, so we did not get as big a boost as larger portfolios might.

Still, who could predict that would happen? Let’s just keep focusing on our own game.Much of the growth is coming from great performances and dividend wins from Aguero, Alcantara, Thauvin and more recently Traoré.

There have been times when others have wavered on these players.
Aguero and Alcantara didn’t get much attention over the Summer when many others did. Thauvin had a slow start to this season and Traoré appeared to go off the boil after an explosive start.

But this shows that when the underlying stats are good, and you have good reasons to be confident in the player, hanging in there and staying patient will usually bring rewards. When you are buying quality you can stand firm and not get pushed around by how other traders feel and act.

Decisions

Sells and Holds

Tolisso has been offloaded following his injury. I’d love to be able to say that I caught this at the time, but the truth is I didn’t because I was away on holiday.

Another self-imposed constraint of this Challenge that I probably didn’t highlight enough was that I want it to work for people who don’t trade on the Index as a full time job.

We’ve got to be able to succeed without 24/7 news monitoring and we’ve got to be able to take a holiday.

So, not noticing Tolisso’s injury until the day after, I had to take a hit on this in reality and I’ve done the same in the challenge. This is a risk I accept because I do not want to monitor every game, and on the limited number of occasions where it happens, I just accept it and move on.Everyone else was an easy hold. Dubois was perhaps the only question mark but I always felt he would return to the starting line up (discussed more in the watchlist below) and he did last night. He’s dropped in price but I think he will go back up.

Buys

With funds freed up from Tolisso as well as some dividend wins we had a bit of cash to go shopping (I actually forgot to add dividend wins to my bankroll last update, oops).In come Waldemar Anton and Luis Alberto.
Anton was first highlighted in my Bundesliga Technical Area article on the 6th September. He was just 91p then and £1.21 now. In reality I bought him there and then, but for the Challenge, by the time I had cash free from Tolisso, he was 99p.

He has transfer links to bigger teams like AC Milan, and has established himself as a first team player at a young age. He’s highly rated and I particularly like his good distribution, a fashionable style of play that will be of interest to big teams and also helps us in performance buzz. Also, he’s cheap as chips.

Luis Alberto has also been an ever present on the blog in the last month or so following some excellent performances for Lazio.

He’s got a very favourable style of play for performance buzz, a good club to win from and a good performance scoring history. At 25, I think he is entering his prime.

Next Week

I’m feeling on cruise control. I’m happy with the choices and it’s just a case of monitoring them for any changes and dealing with any issues as they happen.

We also need to make sure we have other targets lined up in case we do find ourselves with free cash.

Watching the Watchlist

I spend hours on research each and every week to maintain a list of quality players with great underlying statistics supporting their value.

Each week I will share a small sample of picks that I think make for interesting discussion, not the whole list. I’ve gotta keep a few secrets right?
In most cases I own these players, but sometimes I will be waiting for the right moment to buy. I will also stress again that these are just my views, you should be sceptical of following tips from any source without doing your own research as well.

Each week I review my public picks to see how they have got on since the day I published them. So how are they doing so far?

It’s been three weeks since the Watchlist was last updated and we’ve had a pretty good time.We were getting nice rises in some players and the recent bonus put the turbo boosters under them.

Alcantara, Aguero, Banega, Calabria, Thauvin and Nicolas Pepe all stand out. I’m particularly happy about the first 5 as they are players I have been banging on about for months, often against the grain of general market sentiment.

Pepe was a good one too as 75% gains in less than a month is always cause for celebration.However, it hasn’t all been good news.

Tolisso took a bad injury, and being away on holiday, there wasn’t much I could do about that. He’s a really strong prospect and long term the injury does not change that. In reality, I sold up as it looks like a lengthy one.

But he can stay on the watchlist because I think buying at the now discount price, he’s going to be one for the future and should get a nice bump as he looks close to return hopefully in early 2019.

Lo Celso fell out of favour at PSG and finds himself at Betis. This is far from ideal. But I think he is too good to stay there for long. At Betis, his playing position and threat look decent, so I am happy to keep monitoring him. However, we won’t be getting the immediate returns I was hoping for and patience will be needed here.

Dubois was omitted from the starting line for a few games and this surprised me. He was signed as the long term solution and came with a great reputation, so being dropped completely after just a game or two felt a bit rash to me.

I expected him to come back, and he did for the last game. As usual, he had the ingredients we need too, with good possession numbers and a forward playing position. Many traders are down on him right now, but I still have time for him.

At a discount price and back in the side, I think he now looks good value.
Rony Lopes has struggled too, with a poor start overall from Monaco and then an injury. I don’t think this changes the fact that he is a great young talent at a club known for great youth development. But it’s hardly the start we hoped for. One to monitor.

The Cuts

Any players from the above list that get sold get added to this table. Over the season, we will be able to see whether I am making good cuts or dropping them too early.

* In the cuts list the returns is raw which means not including commission etc. This is just so I don’t have to spend more time working out each one but I just wanted to be clear on that.Out goes Benjamin Bourigeaud for a profit of 92%. He showed very promising numbers last term but his underlying numbers this year haven’t been great. I don’t think he is a bad player and he could yet improve, particularly if he goes to a bigger club. But this felt like a good time to take a very handsome profit.

New Picks

In comes Luis Alberto as trailed and discussed in my Saturday Daily.

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