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, its 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 which can help you throughout the year! 

Undercuts

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 into 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 clearly 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.

The trick right here is to find the right timing to buy. Sometimes the buy window is larger, sometimes its 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. 

A good indicator for the bottom price is small recovery steps. That means, if you see the first 5-10 cards slowly getting bought again, its probably likely that the cards already reached the bottom and now goes up again. From my experience, its like 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. 

Another good indicator are big gaps between the cards. If you see a 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. 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 a rebound. Important to mention here, its 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 its worth it. 

As the most general rule I can give, look out for non-logical substitutes. That means like, 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, its just super dumb (breaking it down to a very simple example). You can expect the card to rebound around 120-140k back again.

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 rebound was small and fast and Van Dijk was back to the normal prices.

Finding the right sell time is another tricky part here, but I personally made the decision 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 its 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 want long, probably around 1h until I list the card again. 

Summary

- People exchanging cards from the club

- Finding the right undercuts

- Noticing a potential rebound

- Selling at after a solid rebound