Now the season is in full swing, things are settling into a nice pattern of weekly winners and losers. The benefit of having a diverse port is that it takes the kick out of the swings a little bit – you’ll usually have someone rising to compensate for the player who’s fallen through the floor. On the otherhand, it does tend to make your overall growth slower.

This week, the Potentials had the biggest winners overall, with Odegaard at the very top of the tree. His rise came off the back of a brilliant debut against Valencia and I suspect that traders spotted that he looked good value compared to similar youngsters. Now at £1.77, he’s starting to look a little high to me so there could be a justification for selling up and taking the profit.

Taking profits is an important part of any trading strategy, and one I’m not always that good at. In the same fund, I’ve recently watched the likes of Cunha, Richter, Oscar Rodriguez and Cuisance drop from their ceiling prices – perhaps I should have sold them while the going was good, and moved onto the next target? Regardless of those trading errors, the Potentials still ended the week roughly £123 up on the week before, a decent 0.3% or so (but are still lagging behind the other funds for the season as a whole).

Next came the Premiums, about £48 up over the week. Much of this came in dividends as always, with Pogba and Neymar sharing the spoils on this. With Neymar looking like he might slip back in to the PSG team soon, I’m considering gradually increasing my position in him.

The only loser from the Premiums this week was Mbappe, who posted a terrible PB score in his last game which added to traders worries that he might not be ‘PB friendly’. As I said in a previous post, I don’t think his PB scores are too bad but his age goes against him on this, as does Neymar being out of the team (surprisingly he usually posts higher PB scores when he is playing alongside him). Anyway, I’m holding for the long term.

The Performance fund had a mixed week, finishing about £46 up but with several players taking a drop after failing to hit the expected levels of performance – Thorgan Hazard, Thiago Alcantara, Lala and Xhaka, to name a few. Given the fluid nature of the Index at the moment, I wonder if I need to be a bit less forgiving with these types of players and shift them on more quickly, in favour of those with better fixtures coming up?

The big winners of the week were the Serie A players, Politano, Fabian Ruiz and Suso with traders getting on ahead of the new season starting. Oyarzabal, who only came into the fund last week, also saw a big rise. Again, I suspect this was due to traders bench-marking his price against other, comparable players and seeing some good value there.

I’ve added Savanier into the port. He’s injured at the moment and not due back for a month or so, but should see a good rise on the way, given the PB scores he posted last year.

Overall, not the most successful week but I’ve still seen a total increase of around 0.5% – the full breakdown can be found on the separate fund pages as always. If I’d have traded a bit more smartly, I think I could have at least doubled that – so some lessons to ponder for the next phase of the season…