Being a talkSport listener, I have been aware of Football Index for quite a while. The adverts never made much sense to me and since I’ve signed us up, I am none the wiser.
Dear, dear Weenie at Quietly Saving has been banging her head against a brick wall trying to help me to understand it, but despite her best efforts, I am still none the wiser.
I’m not being facetious
On a basic level, yes, I get it…it’s a market where one can buy and sell shares in footballers across Europe’s top leagues. The value of these will rise and fall according to who knows what, and they will also be paid out dividends on some unknown other criteria.
It is this lack of clarity which concerns me.
I half-get the dividend thing. Your player does something well, gets some column inches in the papers etc and they earn a dividend. Excellent. Where the hell does that money come from? They haven’t produced anything; they haven’t created any wealth through their actions, so I don’t understand where the money for these dividends comes from.
The buy/sell spreads on the players are huge, but Weenie reassures me these will narrow once football gets back to more normal levels. As it stands at the moment, if we were to sell our holdings we’d lose a massive amount because the sell price is vastly lower than the buy price. I am interested to see this for myself once football has some momentum again, which with around 1/4 of the season to go, should give us enough time to see how this thing really works.
This is gambling, not investing
Football Index IS NOT an investment. It is gambling. Your money is not FSCA protected and you have no recourse. The plus side however, is that any earnings are tax free, but that alone is no reason to be putting your money into this. As always, be sensible and keep an eye on yourself.
At the age of 41, I have been investing in the stock market for 23 years. I have always taken a buy and hold strategy for my investing (this is not advice etc), so my natural inclination is to do the same here, but I don’t know that this will work to our advantage on this platform. As far as I can see, the only way they make money is in people buying and selling players, so I guess they will be encouraging the punters to do that as much as possible.
We made our first, and likely only, “investment” at the end of April. I took the mantle on, on behalf of TMM and the glory or ridicule which comes with it. I deposited £50 of funds from the TMM account and, again, thanks to Weenie’s code, we got a £10 bonus. So there we are, we’ve got £60 burning a hole in our pocket.
I took the plunge and bought 13 players some only one share, some with multiple shares and spent around £45. Having tried to read about it and learn what Football Index was all about, I picked players I figured would generate some headlines while there was no games being played.
I figured with the European Championship cancelled, I should get some international players in the mix, as well as ones who will generate transfer speculation column inches. Then I had one or two personal indulgences (Jimenez and Neves, in case you’re wondering) and finally some goal scorers.
Are we making any money?
We’re including the Football Index numbers in our Monthly Income Report now, but as it stands today, we’ve made a small capital gain on the players we bought, although, as the spreads are so huge still, any gain would be wiped out. We’ve also earned a few dividends, so in about 6 or 7 weeks, we’ve made £1.09, so around 2.4% – ain’t no one retiring early on that!
We’ve still got some money in the account, so I will probably have a little splurge this week on some Premier League and La Liga players…the cash isn’t doing us any good sitting in their account, it might as well be generating some sort of revenue, even if I have no clue about where it comes from.
I don’t know if you can tell, but I am a bit of a sceptic about this one. I’m going to let it run for a while and will certainly be following it much more closely once the season gets going again on June 17th, to see what happens to the spread and how the players values fluctuate. As you can see, the asset which has shown the biggest fluctuations is Erling Braut Haaland, which has happened since he’s been back in action with Dortmund in the Bundesliga. Let’s hope Harry’s Kane and Maguire deliver the same goods next week.
I’ll report back in a month to let you know what I’ve been up to with it and see how it has developed.
If any of you want to give it a go, it would be great if you could use the link here. We’ll both get a tenner to spend on something which we have no idea how it works.
Haha, a fair and valid write up – even I only know the basics of how it all works! The pandemic has muddled things up so the fixtures being played should hopefully provide a bit more clarity.
I’ve maxed out my own targeted deposit on this venture so my aim is to double my money so I can withdraw my capital…I’m a very long way off from doing that however!
Football Index is gambling and not investing, although it is a long term bet. I was horrified (and somewhat fascinated) to see several gamblers with 6-figure portfolios when there is absolutely no protection whatsoever, their money is just basically parked in the coffers of a betting company but they seem to reap 3-figure dividends on a daily basis.
Good luck with your picks – not a bad shout going for Wolves players as they’ve got a decent run of games – I’ve got a few on Jimenez and Jota.
After writing the article last night I decided to spend the rest of the money held in the account. There was astronomical amounts of shares being traded, in particular in
Dominik Szoboszlai. Some dude was buying thousands of shares. THOUSANDS!!
I have my own feelings about it all which I won’t publish for fear of a knock on the door from their lawyers, but it all strikes me as being very odd!
Roll on 17th June!!