Buying Low and Selling High: DraftKings Reignmaker Marketplace Strategy

Marketplace Basics

There's a secret about investing in the stock market that guarantees a positive return on investment: Buy low. Sell High. Profit. It's as easy as that.

Except, of course, it's not that easy at all. If you're new to investing in any sort of market, and you've heard about an investment, it's likely that the opportunity to buy low has already passed. You can still buy in at average prices and still profit when your investment's value rises, but the profit margin is smaller. Additionally, you'll be tempted to try aiming for the peak of value, but correctly predicting what that peak is can be extremely difficult

You could sell when the value of your investment has risen by 15%, and feel great about it, until the next day it rises another 20%, and then berate yourself for being too quick to pull the trigger. When you're trying to buy into an investment at its lowest point, the same exact challenge presents itself. Being armed with as much information as possible about your investment is essential to predict the highs and lows.

See Also: Intro to NFTs

The best way for you to maximize profits from investing is to invest in what you know. Once you've identified your area of expertise, you want to diversify across multiple investments in that area rather than focusing on just one. If you've got $100.00 to invest, it's generally better to make 10 purchases at $10 apiece than to put that $100.00 into a single investment. Aiming to sell each $10.00 investment at $12.00 will net you the same $20.00 profit, but with less risk than aiming to sell your $100.00 investment at $120.00.

Bad calls are always going to happen, but if you diversify you can afford make a few bad calls and still profit. Setting guidelines for when to sell and when to buy based on percentages of your total investment is key.

The Reignmakers Marketplace

If you're reading this, you're already at least interested in fantasy football and Reignmakers, so you're off to a good start. The Reignmaker marketplace behaves like many other marketplaces do, with card values fluctuating based on events that occur or are expected to occur. Injuries are a big driver of price changes. A short-term injury will usually decrease a player's card value, and it will often increase the value of that player's backup or other players on that team's depth chart.

There's also the effect of the SuperStar designation, with its limit of one card per lineup. An underperforming SuperStar card will see its value decrease, while an overperforming SuperStar will maintain or increase in value. With DraftKings adding more players to the pool of SuperStars after Week 8, it could pay to speculate on players that will be added and sell high now before their value potentially drops.

After getting Jameis Winston as the only viable QB in my own starter pack, the first thing I did was look for quarterback values in the marketplace. The most obvious cards at the time like Josh Allen and Lamar Jackson were priced well above Joe Burrow, so I bought a Core Burrow for $19.96. As of this writing, it's going for $35.00 (Core) on the marketplace. Finding an underpriced quarterback and selling high after a great performance (or multiple performances) is a great way to profit.

Burrow is also helped by the fact that Bengals WR Ja'Marr Chase is already a SuperStar, protecting him from a value decline. DraftKings announced there won't be any QB and WR SuperStar cards on the same NFL team, so Burrow can't be added to the list. If you are conservative with your total Reignmaker investment, finding marketplace values in the Core tier is a great way to grow your available cash.

You could do a lot worse than simply looking at 4for4's weekly quarterback projections and buying the player cards with the lowest costs among the top 10, as 4for4's projections have a better correlation to future QB performance than even their team's implied point total or salary.

As you go up in tier level, the required minimum investment increases, but so does potential profit. The lowest price on the marketplace for a Jalen Hurts Core card right now is $26.00. The lowest rare version of the card is $112.00, Elite is $1,015.00, and Legendary is $3,800. As the tier goes up, the card rarity goes up, and the price follows. You might go wide-eyed at the cost for Hurts' Legendary card, but it's got a mint count of just 10 total cards.

Buying, Selling, and Holding

How frequently you use the marketplace depends on how you play the game. If you're purely a collector looking to get your favorite player cards, you can follow the marketplace along with NFL news to take advantage of dips in prices.

If you're mostly contest-oriented focusing on the Core tier, you'll want to grow your Core collection so you're able to use multiple lineups with viable starters for contests. You might use the marketplace to occasionally sell high on an inflated player value, and use the profit to target a specific skill-position player projected to have a great matchup, or even just buy back that initial player when his price dips and pocket the difference.

When playing at the Elite levels and above, you'll want to pay close attention to current player values, the upcoming NFL schedule, injuries and SuperStar changes as value swings can amount to much larger gains and losses.

Whatever tier you're targeting, you'll ultimately want to be specific about how you want to approach Reignmakers. As long as you have a clear plan and don't haphazardly buy and sell at different rarity levels without a goal, there are a lot of different ways to have fun AND profit.

See Also: Intro to NFTs