Thought I'd update people on a few things. As the baseball (and more importantly, fantasy baseball) season winds down, I'll have more time to work on racing and pedigree research. My new projects have gotten held up for a few reasons - lack of time, some difficulty getting ahold of the right data to do the studies properly, and most importantly, I went back to make some changes to the original study comparing the results of horses at different types of auctions. I showed the study to a few people, and the feedback from everyone was similar to my own opinion. "Great study, valuable results, but you need to factor in some sort of analysis of cost of ownership and ideally would include a wider variety of auctions". Since my goal is to provide the best research available anywhere, I'm working on making those changes. When I'm done the study will include a profitability analysis for each horse in the study, based on how many years they raced. It will also include some less 'elite' sales than those that were originally included.
I'm also looking for an update on something. Does anyone know what happened to Blood-Ex? They did their 'pilot launch' in June, and there hasn't been a peep out of them on their website or in the news since then. I emailed them several days ago, and didn't get a reply.
Sunday, August 24, 2008
Thursday, August 21, 2008
The Iron Horse
Scot Gillies from The Bloodhorse posted a comment here asking what I thought of their new study on 'The Iron Horse'. I'll have some more comments on it soon, but thought I'd start by sharing the email I sent to him:
Hi Scot. You had asked me (via my blog) what I thought of the Bloodhorse study 'The Iron Horse'. I've read it several times now, and believe that (as the study itself said) it provides a useful starting point, but doesn't really allow us to draw a lot of conclusions. Basically it shows that across many segments of the business, horses race less than they use to. It does not indicate anything one way or the other about whether the breed is actually less durable, or whether training methods have trained. Like Rob Whiteley, I would tend to doubt whether there has been enough time for the breed to change as drastically as many people seem to think. The most interesting thing to me is that even at the lower levels of competition, where there would seem to be financial incentive to race horses more often, rather than less often, racing schedules are much lighter than they used to be. Is it possible that the entire industry has missed the boat on this one, and are making a financial mistake in an effort to copy the techniques of the people at the high end of the industry? It's something I'll be giving a lot of though to, and hope to come up with some answers to.
Hi Scot. You had asked me (via my blog) what I thought of the Bloodhorse study 'The Iron Horse'. I've read it several times now, and believe that (as the study itself said) it provides a useful starting point, but doesn't really allow us to draw a lot of conclusions. Basically it shows that across many segments of the business, horses race less than they use to. It does not indicate anything one way or the other about whether the breed is actually less durable, or whether training methods have trained. Like Rob Whiteley, I would tend to doubt whether there has been enough time for the breed to change as drastically as many people seem to think. The most interesting thing to me is that even at the lower levels of competition, where there would seem to be financial incentive to race horses more often, rather than less often, racing schedules are much lighter than they used to be. Is it possible that the entire industry has missed the boat on this one, and are making a financial mistake in an effort to copy the techniques of the people at the high end of the industry? It's something I'll be giving a lot of though to, and hope to come up with some answers to.
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