Value Sires

For this final part of the series, we are looking at stallions who have retired to stud since 2021 and will thus have either first foals or yearlings at the sales this year or are about to cover their first book of mares. There is plenty to digest from three years' intake and of course prices can often drop after a stallion's first year at stud, so there could be some value to be found for breeders willing to roll the dice on a stallion about to embark on his...

It tells you plenty about the business today that this final leg of our quest for value on Kentucky farms should compress together stallions whose various retirements from the racetrack spanned more than decade. In devoting nearly all the previous instalments to individual classes of younger stallions, we've simply mirrored the distribution of mares, which as we all know is massively loaded towards largely unproven sires. To me, then, those few survivors that do establish a viable niche in the Bluegrass are real heroes. While dozens of their original competitors...

It is perhaps at this level of the market that bookings have not yet been finalised for this year's matings. While a number of those named here have since moved up in fee bracket on the back of success with runners and subsequent market response, there is still plenty of value to be found in the hope that stallions coming through could be similarly upwardly mobile. The aim of this exercise has been to show the average profit for stallions at each of four different levels of the market according...

And so we come to the abyss: that giddy phase between launching your first juveniles and being able to claim a viable niche in this most unforgiving of marketplaces. Yes, for those few young stallions that do manage to seize their fleeting opportunity, a narrow path can rise rapidly towards lucrative heights. Most of the others, however, find themselves clinging to a crumbling ledge. Whatever you do, don't look down! It's easy to disparage the robotic tendencies of the commercial market. Too easy, certainly, for me to have neglected the...

As we move into the third tier of our examination of stallions by yearling profitability, the name at the top of the list for those standing between the equivalent of £10,000 and £19,999 perhaps provides an example of how rarity drives demand. On paper, the Dalham Hall Stud-based Farhh (GB) has an awful lot going for him. A son of Pivotal (GB) out of a dual Group 1 winner over a mile and a half, he was lightly raced, with just one winning appearance in each of his two- and...

Continuing our series on the profitability of stallions, this week we are looking at those who stood between £20,000 and £49,999 in 2020. Three of the top four in this table have subsequently graduated to the higher-fee bracket outlined in Part I of this series last Thursday.  As previously stated, we will be examining sires in four key price brackets according to their yearling sales returns of 2022 set against their fees at the time of covering. The average profit has been determined by the stallion's fee plus a figure...

Value is relative. A homebred yearling by a lowly stallion who goes on to reap rich rewards on the track, or one by a more fashionably expensive name who brings a bonanza return in the sale ring could each be considered to have offered 'value' for their breeders. In a slight departure from the norm for this annual series, we will be looking at the profitability of stallions in four key price brackets according to their yearling sales returns of 2022 set against their fees at the time of covering,...

Today we finally come to a group that has at least had some initial opportunity to show whether or not they can replicate their own racing prowess. By the same token, of course, this means that their level of support--which in many cases will already have declined through each preceding year, as racetrack exposure draws perilously closer--may now fall off a cliff. If the stampede to unproven sires is ludicrous, then so is the haste with which they are abandoned. Stallions whose stock should plainly be granted time to mature...

No getting away from it, the young stallions we assess today have already completed their service to many breeders. They've processed a debut crop of yearlings, often on an industrial scale, and many have obliged with the kind of averages that vindicate the familiar, self-fulfilling commercial cycle that so favors new sires: demand generating supply, and the quality incidental to that increased supply in turn increasing demand. That leaves us with another tricky podium. You can't just congratulate those who have "won" on this system, topping out the first-crop yearling...

The group we consider today for now retains a convenient gloss, still in the happy position of offering "all talk, no action." But they will actually have got as far as delivering their first flesh-and-bone foals into the straw by the time they start receiving their second book of mares. And many of the people who exploited their novelty value last year will automatically have moved on to the next intake of rookies, rather than expose themselves to the peril that the market won't like a debut crop. Foals conceived...

Welcome to our annual assessment of Bluegrass sire prospects for the approaching covering season. As last year, we're going to confine our focus largely to a "Value Podium" for each intake--rather than attempt, as in the past, an exhaustive (not to say exhausting) assessment of every stallion in the Commonwealth of Kentucky. Believe me, it wasn't always easy to find something adequately civil to say about every last one! But the fact is that this is only ever one person's opinion and, as such, a hopelessly subjective exercise. By restricting...

As the 2022 breeding season approaches, we bring our Value Sires series to a close by shining the spotlight on 10 sires with their first crops four and older that appear poised to deliver breeders value. Though it seems at times as if the chasm between the elite proven sires and the unproven pretenders is ever-widening, driven by the often ruthless nature of the auction marketplace, there is still value to be found among the lesser-priced proven sires. We have opted to make the cutoff fee for this exercise £/€20,000,...