I have had access to, and have been following the advice of, Football Index Investor for the last few weeks.
As covered in Graham’s introduction here, this service provides advice on which players to buy and sell on Football Index, a website that allows you trade shares in football players.
Players’ values rise and fall based on demand for their shares, exactly the same as per any stock market index.
With football now coming back across most of the popular leagues, it seems the right time to give this a go.
It’s going to be a little different to the usual trial, as I think returns will take longer to accrue. There’s no “Bet” to win or lose, so we’re waiting on the price to move over the medium to longer term.
You also make some profit by getting paid dividends. You get Match Day Dividends, based on how well your player did according to a raft of Opta Stats when compared to others in his position. These can get as high a 8p per share.
Media Dividends are awarded to players who garner the best coverage in the UK media, these can go as high as 5p per share on non match days. Finally, you have In Play Dividends for the first 30 days that you own shares in a player, these pay out 1p-2p per shot/goal/assist/clean sheet depending on the player’s position.
Players are bought either for the long term potential profit of their (hopefully) increasing price, or for potential short term gain via In Play dividends. I started wading through all the instructions on the 26th May and followed the rules to buy all the Long Term players listed in the service’s portfolio (except a couple that had been marked as “Hold Off Buying”), but I only bought the Short Term players on that day.
Each newsletter gives exact details of which players to buy, the reason for the pick, whether they are Short or Long term buys, and finally what percent of your bank you should use.
I initially intended using £1000 as a starting bank, but I’m not sure that’s going to be enough to generate a profit after taking account of £29.97 per month membership fee. So I’m going to use £2000 as a starter.
As I said earlier, I’m not expecting this to pay out rolling profits every month, I expect a drip feed of funds earned from dividends, and then a decent profit to be made when we sell our shares a while down the line.
As of last Tuesday (newsletters arrive on Tuesday, so that’s when I revalue my portfolio) I own shares in 60 different players, and my purchases so far have cost £1,725.47 of my £2000 starting bank. They are currently worth £1724.24 and I’ve been paid a total of £5.11 in dividends, so I’m basically about £4 up. But bear in mind that we’re only just coming back to football after the “Lurgy-Lull” (it’s taken me the whole 3 months to think up that gem, and it’s yours to use as you see fit, as a free gift!) and Football Index are just bedding in a new Matching Book system thanks to their teaming up with NASDAQ technology.
I think there’s the possibility the Index could explode in popularity once people get the hang of it. It’s been around a good while, I had a play with it a few years ago and I’ve got two mates that have done very well indeed on it. I think if you’re a Fantasy Football fan, or Football Manager computer game veteran (my first version of that was the Kevin Toms one on a Commodore Vic20) I think you’d probably really enjoy doing your own research and building your own portfolio. In the meantime joining this service for a month or so to see if you like it seems a pretty good idea. We’ll see how we go. I’ll report back every few weeks.
Don’t forget you get a 30 day money back guarantee for a bit of peace of mind
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