TOTY Comprehensive Trading Guide

On the 12th of January 2015 special cards or "Team of The Year" cards are released, which are basically a special IF card (much like the "blue Messi") that players who have performed well over the season are gifted.

How does this affect prices?

So, in this January period when TOTY is released, players have the best or biggest chance to pack some incredible players and thus a large proportion of players will inevitably buy packs. This, like we saw with "blue Messi" and "Lightning packs" causes a huge increase in supply of player cards and thus a subsequent drop in price. As such an abundance of TOTY cards are released this will be probably one of the largest pack openings and the market will hit rock bottom, with some players decreasing in price by up to 60%.

Now, many players will soon realise that the value of their players will vastly decrease. So most players sell their entire team and entire player base within their club, only to buy it back when prices are cheaper during the TOTY crash. This selling can occur up to roughly one month away, so as multiple players do this, more cards are available on the market and prices slowly decrease.

How to profit (without buying packs)?

Prices after TOTY will rise, as they have no other option. Due to this also being the single biggest event that could cause a market crash, this is probably the safest form of investment anyone could ever choose to partake in. It's more of a question of who will earn you the most profits, rather than who will earn you any profits. For instance I run a paid service whereby I advise players on who to invest in. This is me purely sitting down for a few hours and analysing past trends and market performance. I would say my specific skill set is estimating prices of players and who are good investments. I aim to make my clients more money in profit for a lesser cost than buying FIFA coins, as this is an interactive, legal and educational way to play FIFA. Now obviously you don't have to do it to that degree of accuracy, however by having a "general idea" by following the criteria listed below you are on course to make some good cash.

Picking a player to invest in after TOTY will depend on some key factors including; popularity, league, performance in real life, position and nationality. If these simple 5 criteria are met you can bet you will be making profits. 

For example, IF Xherdan Shaqiri was a player R2R7 invested heavily in over this past weekend. R2R7 bought 7 of him for 188,000. In a matter of hours, the price jumped to 275,000. Now, here we won't focus on the profits and how much R2R7 invested, this time we'll concentrate on the motive behind investing in this player.

So, here we'll match IF Shaqiri against some of the criteria above:

Popularity – Shaqiri is a popular player, playing for arguably one of the best clubs in the world and has a high rating.
League – The Bundesliga is the 3rd most popular league to form a team around behind the BPL and Liga BBVA.
Performance – Shaqiri is a unarguably a great player, his performance has been good, not incredible, scoring 1 goal in the Bundesliga and assisting 2. This does not give him enough credit however, as he has played an essential role at RM for Bayern Munich.
Position – Normal Shaqiri's position is RM, however his position on his IF card is CAM which is most of the time converted to ST. Thus making him more desirable due to his high pace, dribbling and shooting attributes.
Nationality – Xherdan Shaqiri is Swiss, which unfortunately is not a popular nationality. This really doesn't matter however as the benefits in this case outweigh the negatives. An example of a popular nationality is Spanish, as a large amount of people create solely Spanish squads.

Shaqiri also has a huge trait, which makes him very desirable. This trait is that he is the second highest rated striker behind Lewandowski. Many players actually prefer Shaqiri rather than Lewandowski, solely due to his pace.

Like I say every single guide, if you match this criteria up with other players whom you are looking to invest in you will find players whose price will rapidly rebound after the TOTY crash. Shaqiri is just a good example, there are others though who potentially will earn you greater profits this TOTY.

A Few Tips

The first one is obvious. Don't buy the packs. Yes, there is a chance you will pull a TOTY Messi or Ronaldo, however the chances of you doing so are so slim that you'd be better off investing all of your FUT coins due to the safe nature.

Secondly, in the meantime, buy a very cheap squad which will be "resistant" to the market crash. This is a squad where the players are around or at "discard price" as they physically cannot go down any lower than their discard price.