So, since Im doing well in the Sportbet fantasy comp, I figure I need to sit down and get serious about my trading. The first thing I noticed- Boy, its hard to trade without TooSerious on hand! No wonder its so damn popular, Ive gotten so used to using this site to play, Im finding it difficult to go back to a time where I didnt have it helping out.

The second thing I thought to myself, people that are new to these parts just wont know how powerful this tool is, and visualising, or putting together a trading plan could be a new thing.

(More over the break)

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Firstly, I want to cover what make a good trade, well, a good one. For mine, there are 4 aspects to any good trade.

Extra points: This is probably the biggest of all reasons to trade. We trade to make our team better so that it can earn us extra points over the year- Points can be earned either through coverage of a missing player, or through upgrading a playing player to a better one- The second of which also costs $$. A good single trade should probably be earning you 300+ points over the year, 400 if youve done very well.

Freeing up cash: These trades tend to go hand in hand with the upgrade trades. When trading, it can be easier to think of a pair of trades as a single one, and do the figures based on that- for example, this week if I were to trade Krakouer down to a rookie, then Duigan up to Adcock, based on a more sustainable average of 100 for Adcock and a 75 average for Duigan, you get a 25ppg increase per game, over 18 games makes for a 450 increase, plus maybe 50 due to Duigans extra bye- however, over two trades, you can say that each trade has earned 250.

As an aside, that extra week worth of bye is really hampering the growth of our cows! So while the above set isnt "ideal", with extra trades- an early aggressive trade as mentioned above isnt as bad as it seems.

Generating cashflow: This can be viewed in two ways- its particularly important early in the season to pick up the best rookies, but early-mid season, youre still going to need a few more rookies coming through to get your squad fully upgraded. Mid-late season, the cash generated isnt that important, but having playing rookies is as injuries and byes will still mean theyll need to be fielded!

Grabbing a bargain: They say that a penny saved is a penny earned and that is particularly true when trading into premiums. If you honestly believe that JRoo is going to average 95 from here on out, then grabbing him at his current price is a $100k profit for your team as a whole- yes, the benefit of this is also taken into account in the points aspect, but if you can secure the same points in a trade, for $100k less- then youre going a great job.

So generally, when trading- these are the boxes you should be looking to tick- of course though, there are always exceptions, like Paul Chapman- hes hardly what you would call a bargain right now, but when looking at his point scoring ability, particularly when compared to the other forwards around him, hes someone that youre going to want to get in to secure a maximum amount of points in the forward line throughout the season.

So, how do I use TooSerious to tick these boxes. If you havent yet registered, youll need to do that <a href="http://tooserious.net/signup">here[/url].   Then youll want to set up your team. Click over on the <a href="http://tooserious.net/profile">profile[/url] tab, and create your team. You can now either edit the team and click upload to bring your team in directly, or you can manually enter in your squad. Once your team is filled in, head over to the stats page and filter on it- you now have easy access to see what direction your players will be heading salary-wise. This is particularly important for your cashcows as you can track how close they are to being ready for a trade down. How I do that is to look at their Breakevens and compare that to what I expect them to score the following week. If the BE is close to what you expect them to make, then they are probably due for a trade-down, but still, click on the little calculator and have a play with their movements, you might find that they have a string of easy games coming up that could make you some sizable coin. Youll also find the <a href="http://tooserious.net/ticker.php">ticker[/url] will help you to see if theyve got a hard or easy run coming up.

Finding rookies to trade down to is fairly simple, just take off all the filters and then sort it by either the BE, or the predicted movement over 3 weeks- this should let you know who is on the bubble, and who will be flying up in price over the next few weeks. Of course, before trading in- have a play with their salary calculator.

Next, finding bargains- For mine, I tend to sort the data by using the YTD movement. Looking through all the players who have lost a lot of salary, but have now scored big so that their BE is very low, is a great way to figure out exactly who is cheap- and who is looking like they are about to start flying back up in price. JRoo and his 136 this past weekend is a perfect example of such value. However, you do need to believe that hell bounce back as simply buying someone who is cheap but then doesnt improve (Davis last year), is a killer!

Im actually interested if any of you out there have any other tips and tricks on how you use TS- or in how you select where your trades should be going, so jump into the comments and let me know!

One of the more advanced things that the Way Too Serious do, is to set up a trading schedule. Im actually planning on getting something like this build into TS, but for now, Excel- or Open Office- will suffice. Essentially what you want to do is to track your rookies, figure out which rookies you believe will be maxed out at what point, and then pencil them in for a trading. Of course, these things have a tendency to become redundant as more information comes to light, but in visualising exactly how youre going to turn your team of rookies into a full group of studs, it can be invaluable. It also means you can track exactly how much cash youll need for any particular upgrades you might have planned- the big one is Ablett in round 10, his tendancies to still knock out 140s means that he aint going to be dropping too much by then, so a simply 2-trade deal probably wont suffice- youre either going to need to trade out a high-end mid pricer, or simply plan ahead and leave a little in the kicker as you go along. Keeping track of this through a plan allows you to appreciate exactly what you need to do to achieve this goal. It will also help you plan to have enough trades on hold to deal with injuries as they crop up.

So, there you have it- sorry to be dropping it so close to the trading deadline, but Im hoping it gives you something to think about over the next few, all important, trading weeks.