Live Blog
The market seems stable so I am going to end the blog there and look at this again tomorrow. If I have any more thoughts, I'll share them in the members area as usual.
Overall, there were some really interesting points here but unlike other annoucements, it wasn't one that had my brain working overtime - it was just a really straight forward boost to players of real FI quality. And really, that's exactly what was needed.
I feel like the preparation was right and that's the most important thing, it's a real boost for the site Key Strategy and it goes to show that when you don't stray too far from the real win mechanics of FI, you make your own luck. Goodnight! 🙂
Ok a slightly longer break. Man's gotta eat. Also, there isn't a great deal going on right now and I think this reflects what I briefly mentioned earlier - lots of people will have committed their balances in hope/expectation of a positive announcement
That was the best strategy and I've said that a few times this week. I haven't made a single trade today and that's perfect, a significant number (but not all by any means) of the players rising significantly this week and today are in my portfolio already. That's the ideal scenario.
So, many will have seen a decent gain since the market reopened (Actually it never really closed!) but are perhaps feeling a bit underwhelmed with the immediate gains in the last hour.
Feeling like that is fine and I think with the extreme optimism ahead of the announcement, that is probably what we should expect.
Many will likely be worried about charging in after these big rises, and they should be. It will take a while for prices to settle, and these big performance players who have been powering ahead will need to justify those prices before they can move up much further. In short, players need wins or at least consistent high scores. Overall, the risers list is currently very solid although there are a few exceptions - the mass perception of who is strong or not is often wrong.
So, as per the 18:23 entry below, I would suggest focusing on the cheaper end of the market now as I believe traders will now seek value in players that have not had significant rises recently.
Short Break: I am going to take a short break probably until 19:30 or so but will continue watching the market tonight and updating for the next hour or two.
Monitoring We can't completely switch off, though.
We have to watch for signs of our players overheating and becoming too expensive, carried by the wave of hype over the last week and tonight.
Fortunately, the strength of the dividend increase at 57% gives confidence to many that this flurry of buying was not foolish. If we were dealing with a 25% increase, we might be a bit more worried. In general, with my "core" Key Strategy choices who have that performance strength and full season fit, with domestic dominance, Europa/CL involvement and then optimism for Euro 2020, I'm usually very happy to be holding them further. The trends of this season, and their consistent strong scores (and dividend wins) should keep funnelling traders towards them. It's not just about Euro 2020. It's that Euro 2020 and late stage European players will hold their value longer into the domestic season too because they won't suffer from that "end of season sell off" fear in the same way others do.
For players who are perhaps a bit average on performance, or who lack a key feature from my desired trend fit and are being carried to a high price now (Maybe the market thinks the player is great when I know he is average for example). I'd be much happier to let someone take them off my hands for a premium right now.
Summary Overall, there isn't much to do here for me in terms of trading which is the dream scenario if you have prepared for an announcement well.
As we have all week, we are seeing continued rises in the last 20 minutes for high quality performance players, many of whom fit Key Strategy.
As many rose already, I am still not sure whether we will see just a nice boost or a huge boost. It may be that many people had assumed a dividend increase and were in already (which is why they have been rising all week) and we are now just seeing the "wait and see" stragglers following in which if you read back to my preview posts, that's exactly what we want.
We do seem to have avoided any pull back or negative news that would knock plans off course. It's just on the whole a really solid announcement that strengthens the hand of any trader who is stacked with real quality players and I hope that includes everyone reading this.
These announcements are almost always about the preparation in the weeks before rather than the knee jerk reaction after the news - that's the key. And if you currently feel in a good place, it's a job well done.
No Increase for IPDs This is fair since they got the love the last time out. They remain fairly generous however it may be wise to be cautious in this area of the market for a week or so and see how this settles. People could read that as "IPD just got less profitable compared to normal dividends". Which is a bit true, although they still remain a decent incentive.
A New Dividend Table Every Season! This is a welcome announcement and gives a bit of a pattern to the cycle of "buy then dividend increase". Because we now know when we can reasonably expect a possible increase, it will help us pace things a bit more and it will also probably encourage people to trade more on the assumption that dividends will keep being increased in line with platform growth. Again, a general boost in confidence for dividend returning players of all kinds.
Long Term Performance: A bit hidden at the bottom is the intent to implement a longer term performance score (something like a dividend award from a consistent high score over a month? Player of the Month?). This is not coming now but later. You can only read this as another net benefit for players who perform strongly on a consistent basis (high baseliners).
Extra Time: Moving the dividend deadline from 14:00 to 15:00 on a match day is a small boost for short term traders. We can expect increased activity on the announcement of team sheets which can cause a bit of fluctation, but not really something we need to worry about tonight I'll cover that another time.
Performance Details: The main change here is that Star Player just became extremely important particularly on the Gold Days where the payouts are now extremely high if you hit your big win.
Therefore, this gives an even bigger premium to those heavy hitters who can actually blow the opposition away with a 300+ score on a reasonably regular basis. Players of the Neymar, Messi, Kroos, Alcantara, Parejo level who can just smash the day with a monster score are big winners here.
Media: A nice boost for media but it is fairly modest actually and if I was a trader who held premium media picks I'd be a bit disappointed. It does nothing to address their fear of the top 200 stealing their media and even more importantly, does nothing to stop the creep of the new Bronze, Silver and Gold match days which are squeezing out the total number of media days available. I see no particular reason to charge into this area of the market as a result of the announcement.
Do we need to sell anything when the market re-opens?
Depends, but I would say where I have a quality performance player that matches Key Strategy and has that full season fit I look for, no, I would keep hold of them.
Players who aren't as good as people think who you don't want anyway - now is probably a decent moment to get someone to take them off your hands.
Let's start with performance. It's a fairly flat increase so that means we don't have to redraw our perception of who is good and who isn't.
I had a bunch of stuff prepared to share in the event of tiered PB payouts, but that now goes out the window. I'd have liked that change, but it's ok it's not here.
The important thing is that we got a significant dividend increase that nobody can credibly argue wasn't enough.
That alone leads to good things for Site Strategy. This is a straight up boost for any strong performance player. We can expect a continued boost to obvious players considered to have performance strength, many of which have already been rising in the last week but could well continue to do so on the back of this announcement.
However, many will also be aware that these players have risen significantly in anticipation of this announcement.
Once these top prices get stretched, people will start shopping for value and will spot the price gap between the proven top end and the £1.75 and under range. Therefore, if I had money to spend, my priority would be looking for value in the lower price brackets rather than charging into the more obvious choices - we should already be well stacked with plenty of those.
So good quality players who are out of form or otherwise currently unfashionable (Brandt? Barkley? Milinkovic-Savic? Leon Bailey? Eriksen? Thauvin? Deli Alli?) Or a good performance player who has not yet broken out (Tolisso? Thorgan Hazard? Rodrigo de Paul?) might be a better bet than following the top of the trends at this stage.
This is good. It's specifically good for anyone currently stacked full of quality players with a chance of winning dividends now or in future. That probably means most of us (or why are you here?!).
There is a simple message here in that a 57% increase without a major shake up in who the winners and losers are is a net benefit broadly to players who already return dividends.
Therefore, my overall impression is that anyone following Site Key Strategy should be happy and won't have to make too many radical changes.
There are however a few very interesting points in the announcement and I'll start working through things in more detail now.
BY THE WAY. I have not tried to trade but there is Twitter chatter that they forgot to suspend the market (!?) so that's worth checking if it concerns you.
This is the last post before the announcement so I wish everyone the best, there isn't much we can do now except wait to see what we see.
As soon as I have something to say after reading it, it will be here.
Certainly before the market re-opens at 6:30pm and usually a lot sooner, depending on how technical/complicated it is. i.e how much math they make me do.
Something to think about before the announcement, and a question I always ask myself when developing a strategy is this: How do we lose?
I've spoke often below about why I think the Site Strategy puts us in a position to win, but what could go wrong? To have a bad night, there would have to be no boost or a very weak boost for performance dividends (less than 25%?).
There is no perfect strategy and this is a risk because we are so heavily stacked into performance if using the Key Strategy. But is it a credible scenario? No boost is very hard to see happening. As I've been saying, if you announce a Dividend Review designed to make sure dividends reflect prices, you are basically saying you are going to increase dividends and if you don't, it's hugely misleading. Could happen, but unlikely given the importance FI clearly attach to performance on the platform.
More likely, there could be an increase of around 20-25% which is significant however because FI have hyped it so much, that could actually result in disappointment and possibly even withdrawals because people expected 50% or even 100%.
So a 25% or less increase might need a bit of caution, but, provided we have stuck to the golden rule of not holding poor quality players at massively inflated prices, we will have managed this risk as well as we can.
As I have been saying in the lead up to this announcement, given the Site Strategy has been focused primarily on high quality performance players with a "full season" trend fit, the announcement should play right into it without having to do too much differently.
It certainly has so far in the lead up to it and that's a good sign because it shows that it is pushing other traders into an area of the market that Key Strategy users (or even just members who follow Scouting but do their own thing) will have already been occupying.
But what next? The ideal announcement tonight from my perspective would be a major boost for performance (at least 50%), whether that comes in a flat increase or, my personal preference, tiered performance payouts with a 1st, 2nd, 3rd placing or similar.
That's reasonable to expect and if that happens, it should be a good night.
Is 50% really reasonable? I mean, it's huge. In reality, 25-30% is big too. But the way it has been hyped up by FI, I fear that less than this might be considered a disappointment by many.
It's also fairly likely that some form of boost for media is offered, given the recent uproar over the squad becoming eligible for media payouts. Outside of these, it's hard to think of too many wild outcomes. We could get something left field like a boost for goalkeepers (own category?) or similar. Going to have a 20 minute break and be back at 5:45pm.
Currently just awaiting the announcement and wondering how many rocket emojis it's possible to fit into a single Tweet.
Whilst the hype from Adam Cole and other FI staff is encouraging/funny and I don't want to be a kill joy, the serious point is that they are creating some huge expectations that they will have to now work hard to meet. The risk is that even massive announcement (Say a 50% dividend increase) is not considered enough by some people and it leads to negativity later. Personally, I think Adam Cole has been doing this long enough to know that and he must really think they have a big announcement up their sleave.
My host has now assured me the site should function as normal tonight (phew), if there any problems, the link to the back up blog is still at the bottom of this page.
Welcome to the Live Blog! From 5:45pm I'll be sharing my real time analysis of the announcement exclusively with members right here on this page.