As you might expect at this time of year, there is lots of gossip floating around that has a huge effect on player prices.

Just one news article can pump a price or wreck it, and there are plenty of recent examples of both.

But not all news articles are created equal. There is a sea of nonsense out there, some of which is simple click bait, some of which is downright fake news.

Rags like Don Balon and the Daily Star just tend to throw out any old rumour in the hope of attracting controversy and clicks. Treat anything in this sort of paper as garbage.

The worst part about this is that more respectable papers will often pick up these stories as they fear missing out on the clicks and if you check the source it can all actually come from the original nonsense published by Don Balon or similar.

You are better off finding good individual journalists to follow, as they have an interest in maintaining their personal credibility by not publishing rubbish.

This link is a little out of date now, but it might give you a starting point of the sorts of sources to give credibility to, and help you identify the stuff that is only good for wrapping up fish and chips.

Rocket Ships

Gabriel Jesus

No news that I can see and it looks like another one who is rising because he has risen.

When you get a move like this with no obvious cause, the momentum is usually started by a single big trader or a trading group. And it is easy to get people to pile in at the moment with the hype so high.

I imagine the “look how cheap he is compared to similar player X” arguments are also being rolled out in various social media forums. This is a popular but very shaky way to judge value.

It might give you information about what people are currently prepared to pay for over valued players, but you shouldn’t confuse that with what a player is really worth.

He has improved recently and he is mounting more of a challenge to Aguero than he has this season.

However, he has got problems. When you are scoring 2 including the match winner in games your team is dominating and still only hitting the 150-180 scoring range, you have questions to answer about performance suitability because conditions don’t get much better than that. And it has happened more than once.

For Index purposes, he really needs to show he can do a bit more than just score tap ins as many accuse him of.

Frenkie De Jong

It looks like Barcelona have finally beaten Manchester City to De Jong’s signature.

De Jong looks like he could become a top drawer midfield engine. The risk with this sort of player is that they become a high baseline nearly man. They will get high average scores but rarely get that goal which will get them a win.

With no goal scoring record before this season, it was something that needed monitoring.

For Ajax this term though, he has scored 3 in 15. That’s encouraging. His goal threat is not huge but he does occasionally get forward and get some shots away.

If he can contribute 3-5 goals a season, he should be a solid performance player. Whether he can do that at a higher level is another question. But I would suspect at Barcelona where they will face a lot of soft teams, he should be able to do that.

Sinking Ships

Denis Suarez

Another example of the transfer roller coaster.

I sold up at the £2.50 mark as the rise started in January. This is pretty much textbook for my trading style. I could have stuck in longer as it went up to £3, but I like to bank profits when I have them particularly when a short term event like a transfer is heavily influencing the price.

As happened today, it only takes one bad headline for the profit to drain away and I have saved myself a month of headaches and freed up funds that are earning money elsewhere.

The other side of this coin though is that I quite often go back to them after a drop. He’s still a good player and there are rumours that Tottenham may swoop in to pick up the pieces.

If not, he will probably tank after the window closes and that might be a good time to buy and hold so that I can do it all again in the Summer.

Hot Gossip

Steven Bergwijn

The Manchester United rumours are back again today and I think they are well worth watching. He is potentially performance suitable and if he did move I see him going to £4-5 fairly easily.

That’s not a bad bet because the price is not crazy and if the window closes without a deal, the rumours will likely come back in the summer.

Krzysztof Piatek

The AC Milan deal looks like wrapping up today. I am finally learning to spell his name without the help of Google. At AC Milan, we’d all better learn the name because he has the potential to score hatfuls if he is the finisher many think he is.

I am surprised more have not been interested in this, perhaps because of disappointment that he is not coming to the EPL. But I think he could do well at Milan.

Paulo Dybala

I brought him in for my New Trader Challenge just this week and we have Real Madrid and Manchester City rumours doing the rounds again.

I actually bought him primarily for more Champions League coverage (t’is the season, after all) but as I said, my back up reason was the potential big transfer. It’s always good to have more than one way to win your bet.

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FIT