The big question about Uncle Mo isn't how he compares with his contemporaries–other North American and European sires with first foals 2013–but rather how he compares to the top sires of yesteryear. Comparing him to other F2013 sires, he has been devastating: he was not only Leading Freshman Sire of 2015, with earnings three times [...]

Both Fasig-Tipton and OBS have tweaked their top 2-year-old sales in the past two years: Fasig finally moved their sale back to the Miami area, now at Gulfstream Park, which met with a lot of approval from their buyers; and OBS expanded their March sale to a 600-horse catalogue, from around 400 previously. Last year [...]

In 2015, Darley's Dubawi was the leading North American or European sire by worldwide earnings, with 147 winners of $22,696,170 (click here), including nine Group 1 winners; yet almost $12.3-million of that–54% of his total Northern Hemisphere-sired 2015 progeny earnings–was earned outside North America and Europe. Nearly half that total came from the win of [...]

It has been my contention for a long time that until a horse has 4-year-olds, notwithstanding market considerations, we don't necessarily always have a really clear picture of whether he is going to succeed at all, and if so, how far up the ladder he is likely to climb. This seems to particularly be the [...]

The market has its own way of measuring the best sires–stud fee. But the stud fee is a result of different components, one of which is fashion, so one of the jobs of analysts is to assess and interpret other measurements of sire success. Today we are looking at three different cumulative statistics for four [...]

Trashing American racing is a popular pastime among some Europeans and other international turfistes: race-day medication, of course (a/k/a drugs), but also that European turf horses often do move up a grade when they come to America, suggesting European turf racing is stronger than America's. That is very likely true. Most 'internationals' don't give a [...]

In the final of our series mining the year-end 2015 APEX data (covering seven years of racing, 2009-2015) we're looking at the age indexes. These are produced for us, as is all the APEX data we use in TDN, by The Jockey Club Information Systems (TJCIS). One of the features of the APEX calculations are age indexes, [...]

Much as we'd like them to, they can't all be superstars. If they can't be stars, or at least A Runners ($134,280 or more in North America in 2015), it's still better if they are useful horses–B Runners or C Runners. A Runners are 2% of starters, whereas B Runners (next 2%) and C Runners [...]

When we did our APEX review of Leading North American and European Sires of 2014 ABC Runners, Coolmore's superstar sire Galileo was out on his own, having sired a total of 60 ABC Runners in the seven countries we cover in 2014. A group of six other sires had ABC Runner numbers in the 40's: [...]

Tracking the progress of young sires is obviously one of the most important aspects of the APEX (Annual Progeny Earnings indeX) ratings. Usually we focus on the two most recent sire crops rated, which in this case would be F2011 (third-crop sires of 2015) and F2012 (second-crop) sires. In order to provide a little context [...]

APEX (Annual Progeny Earnings indeX) ratings are based on the percentage of runners which achieve certain earnings thresholds, which means sires with the highest number of runners are usually at a disadvantage when evaluated by this type of measurement. So the enormity of the achievement by Coolmore's flagship sire, Galileo, in scoring the highest A [...]

In 2014, four sires which went to stud in Kentucky in 2005 and had their first foals in 2006 (so we denote them as F2006 sires) ranked among the top 10 sires in North America: Gainesway's Tapit was the Leading Sire in North America, with a record $18.6 million in progeny earnings. Candy Ride, who [...]