The market keeps powering ahead and shows no real signs of slowing down after the early season exuberance.
And positively, it’s doing so without any kind of silly early season bonus or similar. New traders are joining or else old hands are feeling more confident and lumping more in.
Is this always sensible? Can new traders still join and make money? It depends how you do it.
There is a dangerous perception amongst some that the market will just keep rising forever and you can just chase whichever player is topping the rising list.
If you subscribe to this nonsense, not only are you not making as much money as you could be now, you are also going to get yourself into trouble eventually.
Profits will be taken on highly priced players that don’t deliver, and those underlying weaknesses will eventually get exposed no matter how bullet proof they may seem on the market.
A simple red flag to look for is when a player scores poorly on FI despite having a “great” game as reported by standard match reports or in the eye of a normal football fan.
That’s often a sign that something is wrong and you need to do a bit of digging into that what that player is really doing.
But, for anyone considering joining Football Index, I’d definitely say there has never been a day on FI where I can remember not being able to find good value with a bit of effort.
And I don’t see that changing anytime soon.
Risers
Timo Werner
Excellent from Werner with a hattrick, powering to an impressive 294 score.
He has looked a danger in the opening two games (and across pre-season despite the lack of goal) so whilst you can never predict a hatrick, you can see when a player has the kind of regular good quality chances that makes them possible.
Despite not scoring in pre-season, Werner definitely had the chances to suggest it was a matter of time before the goals came. I gave him good reviews in my members Scouting section from pre-season on the back of that and the real quality will tend to keep coming through in the dividend winners.
Generally, Werner will not have huge levels of involvement in play so he really does need these 2-3 goal days to get a decent score. But he is capable of that and has shown that tendency to bag more than 1 goal per game in the past. He also creates a few chances too so he’s not a total one trick pony.
As long as his goal threat stays as strong as it is has over the opening games and in pre-season, he should continue to do well and can keep producing some decent scores.
In a European Championship year and with an expected transfer to Bayern or even to the EPL at the end of the season he also has a good story to tell about why traders will want him outside of just the performance wins.
Those background factors are really important and when you get positive trends combining with strong performances that is when prices can really get sustained increases.
Robert Lewandowski
Who says older players are bad investments?
Elite veteran Lewandowski has been busy proving that wrong and it’s something I have been looking at for some months now.
It is entirely sensible to have the jitters on older players come mid to late season when you aren’t entirely sure if they will repeat their previous success.
But early season is exactly the time to make the most of the elite veterans who are reaching their peaks.
Combined with the aversion to buying older players it’s been a recipe for elite players at knock down prices.
This is something I have moved heavily to exploit.
In just one month Lewandowski has increased in value by 40% and bagged 5 goals for IPD purposes. He was denied a star player performance win only by the monster score from Insigne. That price increase and return puts most “on trend” youngsters to shame, even if they have been trending and doing well recently.
The biggest profits are often available away from the hype and the bluster about young players, particularly if those young players are of poor quality.
There are a good 5-8 examples of elite veterans on the market right now. Dzeko is another one and he increased by 60% in the last month. 30 year old Bas Dost has increased by over 100% after his transfer.
Following these exact players now may not be the best thing to do.
But the lesson is there are always a wide variety of ways to make the best money and you don’t need social media reassurance for your trading.
I think sometimes when people are on the expensive hype train players that are still rising steadily in the £2.50+ range they believe they are working the best area of the market because that is what is being talked about most on social media.
They aren’t, though.
The old saying is that markets are about information. Once everyone knows about something in a market, the best value is probably already gone.
Fallers
Neymar
The popular narrative on Neymar seems to go something like this:
“Neymar is worth less at Barcelona because he won’t be in a farmer’s league and he will have to compete with Messi”.
Now I’m not a premium player collector and regular readers will know that I don’t personally advocate premium holds very often. They have an important place in the market as a place for more passive investors to park cash for a decent return but it’s not generally my style.
But I think this story that has become “true” about Neymar is wrong.
We don’t know whether the move will happen or not, but I don’t think it matters as much as a lot of people seem to think.
He’s going to keep getting media stories no matter where he is. Performance wise, whether at PSG or Barcelona, anyone who knows the new scoring matrix well is going to tell you Neymar is going to be pulling up trees if he’s playing matches.
He used to be superb under the old system, and like many historically strong performance players, he is going to get even better.
So will Messi. But I think if you start not buying players who will play on the same day as him you are going to start closing down your options pretty rapidly.
Players compete with each other whether they are in the same team or not.
And elite players are almost always going to move to elite clubs where they will have other stars to contend with.
And finally, as a fluffier point, fit Neymar who wants to play for Barcelona feels much better to me than sulky sicknote Neymar at PSG.
Overall, after this price drop and the performance scoring changes, Neymar looks more appealing to me than he has for a long time.