Playing the market

I've had a few questions of late about making transfers with the intention of making money, and the potential rewards this can have. Unfortunately I haven't uncovered any new secret so this post is going to be a bit unscientific, but it will hopefully give some general pointers (and warnings) about how to play the transfer game.

Being first to market
The easiest, and most effective, way to make money is to identify a player who isn't widely held, sign him, and then have him succeed, preferably in a very evident way via a double digit point game or two (consistent 6 point games aren't as effective). For example, after nine gameweeks Gareth Bale had largely been a fantasy disappointment. He had just 26 points (2.88 P90) with 10 of those points coming in one game against Wigan. At that point, if you bought into Bale (7.9m) you would have seen his price rise 0.5m in just four gameweeks and 1.0m after six. By GW21 his price had risen by a full 1.5m. That's great if you bought at precisely the right time, but if you knew how to do that every time you wouldn't be reading this blog.

Being first to market means you need to act quickly, and in my experience, this will more often that not lead to decisions which lose you points. A few other examples of acting early this season:

• 78k managers signed De Laet after his goal in GW2. He earned 5 points in four subsequent appearances before being sent back to his parent club.
• After goals in both of the first two games of the season, 83k managers jumped all over Shane Long, who has averaged 3.1 points per game ever since. 
• 77k managers have signed Gary Cahill, who is yet to set foot on the field in a Chelsea shirt, and is by no means guaranteed a starting place
• 130k managers bought Leon Best in GW6-7 and he's scored 1 goal and 32 points since
• After a couple of good weeks in GW6-7, another 130k managers signed Ramsey who has topped 3 points twice in 14 appearances ever since

Granted, these are a cherry picked list of bad ideas but the point is that these kind of decisions can go horribly wrong and will often cost you points, while playing it a bit safer, and checking underlying data before making moves will often cost you money.

The popular vote

As explained by the good folks at Crack the Code, price rises are based on net transfers in for a given week. That means to earn more money you need to be signing the same players as the masses. Sometimes this will obviously be a wise move (such as the aforementioned period of success for Bale), but often the general public will simply be overreacting to a single gameweek and not basing their decision on logic. Making that transfer too may well net you an increase in money but that won't in itself give you any more points.

A large portion of the content on this site works with trying to spot differential players, so signing popular players is somewhat counter intuitive to this strategy. 

Time value of money

We'd all like more money, in the game, and I'm sure in real life too. But as in real life, the marginal value of each million earned decreases as you get richer and richer (what would you do with a million pounds/dollars/euros versus what would Warren Buffett do?) My team value is currently around 104m, with the growth generated through chasing points rather than value. Right now that can essentially buy the current dream team to date if I am willing to make a couple of minor concessions and accept a budget bench. 

That means that the extra ~3m advantage that some teams enjoy is really only buying them a better bench. That's great if you can get it, and they will certainly enjoy an advantage over my team and may likely finish the season with more points. However, there are a heck of a lot of other teams who took the risks required to earn that extra money who have a lot of cash but find themselves too far behind in points to catch up, now that teams have converged and become very similar. 

It takes 20+ gameweeks (at least) to earn enough money to have a noticeable difference, which of course means you only enjoy an advantage for half a season at best. I'm not sure how many points a better bench will generate over half a season but until I do some better research I'm not convinced it's enough to warrant changing the way we operate in the early part of the season (try to identify value based on player's underlying data and avoid needless risks).