Substitute Trading

What is Substitute Trading?

Substitute Trading is the idea to make coins through Players exchanging cards from the club. This can be from anything, it's just key that people swap a card for another card. 

I’m a bit on the edge to give this guide 2 stars as it requires a bit of a “market feeling” and knowing when a card is too low and when not. But there are a few indicators that can help you throughout the year! 

Predicting the Rebound

Substitute Trading starts with players changing a card from the club and as part of the exchange, most people just throw the card on the market without thinking much. That leads to a massive undercut scenario with people going lower and lower. 

As an example, Ben Yedder IF got panic sold during the Black Friday Promo because he was back in packs. I remember him going from 320k down to 250k, which wasn’t from his supply but from people panic selling the Ben Yedder fearing of losing more coins. Due to all the panic, it just led to big undercuts and lower prices than he should be for the first hour. This was easier to predict as the panic has to stop at some point and a rebound is expected. 

The trick right here is to find the right timing to buy. Sometimes the buy window is larger, sometimes it's smaller, really depends on the situation and the current market. I will keep an eye on the market and help out if I think there’s a solid buy window, but there will also be times I miss it or I’m not even at home watching the market. 

That’s sadly the risk. Nobody can accurately predict the market every single minute but sometimes it's easy and on these days I will let you know.  

Waiting for the Rebound

Another good indicator for the bottom price is small recovery steps. That means, if you see the first 5-10 cards slowly getting bought again, it's probably likely that the cards already reached the bottom and now goes up again. From my experience 6/10 times, this is a solid way to find out the right buy time. Don’t be too scared if you have to overpay a tiny bit (ideally below the tax cost) from the bottom price. 

A different indicator is big gaps between the listings. If you see a 100k card going on undercuts with 5-20k steps each time and without more than 3-5 cards per price point, it’s a good sign. It's a tiny bit trickier to find these but they are as common as the one above.

Rebound

The way to profit from these trends is to look out for the rebound. Important to mention here, it's not guaranteed to see a rebound on every single substitute. I will aim to help you as much as I can to identify the right times for the substitute trading and when I don’t think it's worth it. 

As the most general rule is to look out for non-logical substitutes. That means, if a 3/3 RW player gets released as an SBC for 140k and there’s a 5/5 RW from the same league and Nation who was 150k before just going low as 100k, it’s logical to expect a rebound back to 120-150k due to the card being better than the newly released card.

The same goes for cards that don’t have much relation to each other, how should an exchange happen if they don’t share similarities. That’s a very good indicator for a rebound! As an example, Van Dijk had some lower prices when Upamecano got released, these only share the same position but they are different Leagues and Nation, the panic was small and the rebound was fast, the rebound was even that strong that Van Dijk went back to his previous price.

Finding the right sell time is another tricky part here, but I decided to always compare the card on the market. If there are 10 pages of the card for the same price, I just list and move on as it's unlikely to get past that price. If there are only 2-3 cards then I wait and see if I can get a lazy a tiny bit higher or if I can wait a bit longer. 

In general, I don’t wait too long, if you see a rebound close to the previous price it's fine to cash out. Rebounds with a complete recovery are rare.  

Summary

- People exchanging cards from the club

- Finding the right undercuts

- Noticing a potential rebound

- Selling after a solid rebound