Given the economic climate, the Calder sale of two-year-olds in training yesterday could have been worse, but for most of the pinhookers and other sellers, it was bad enough.
Boyd Browning, CEO of auction company Fasig-Tipton, was quoted in the Blood-Horse as saying that the sale "wasn't as bad as my worst fears, and it wasn't as good as I'd hoped for." In fact, if you look critically at the numbers, it was a good deal worse than appears on the surface, bad as that appearance is. At least three factors make the published results less than completely transparent.
Sold: 102 (same as in 2008)
RNA: 70 (same as in 2008)
Buyback %: 40.7% (0.3% worse than in 2008)
Gross: $25,226,000 (down 28.1% from 2008)
Average: $247,313 (also down 28.1%)
(For those who want to check my arithmetic, or see if they can find even more anomalies, the horse-by-horse sales results are here.)
The differences from last year are not earthshaking, but if there's one thing we should have learned from the past year's financial turmoil, it's that we should insist on understanding the numbers produced by any company, and ensuring that when comparisons are made, those comparisons are truly of apples to apples.
The second reason for questioning the published results of the Calder sale is common to just about every horse auction: the key percentage that never gets reported in news of the sales is the percentage of the total catalog that is actually sold. At Calder this year, there were 272 horses in the catalog, but only 172 of them even went through the auction ring; 100 were scratched before, or during, the sale. So the true number of horses sold at Calder is 111 -- the 102 that were actually hammered down in the ring plus the nine RNA private sales. That's barely 40% of the horses that started out in the catalog. True, some of the scratches were likely the result of injury, as happens even in the best of years, but, as has been happening all of this year’s sales, a lot of them were for economic reasons, as consignors realized they would be getting nowhere near the price they wanted and, rather than be embarrassed in the sales ring, began searching for other options.
Horses that failed to sell at Calder may get one more chance later in the sale season, but from now on, at the OBS sales in
The third factor that helped to keep Calder sale results respectable, if not great, was the very significant investment that Fasig-Tipton's new owners – a corporation called Synergy Ltd., which, if not outright owned by Sheik Mohammed, is closely associated with him -- made to treat prospective buyers well, including a new tent in the parking lot with areas for watching breeze videos, logging onto the internet, and, most important, eating. Free, and good, food provided by the auction house is a welcome addition to the sales scene. Even more imprtant was the help that Fasig-Tipton provided to bring European and Japanese buyers to Calder, including paying some of their travel expenses. These innovations, or, rather, borrowings from the best practices of auction companies in Europe, Asia and Australia, are a welcome addition to the auction scene (I'm waiting to see what Fasig-Tipton has in mind for the terminally gloomy sales pavilion at Timonium), but the greater than normal presence of foreign buyers as a result of Dubai's ownership of Fasig-Tipton and its willingness to spend money to make money probably did raise the Calder results above what they would otherwise have been.
Another sign of
The colts that
Pinhookers were hit pretty badly by the Calder outcome, except for those lucky, or smart, enough to have the horses that John Ferguson wanted. Back last September, when the pinhookers were buying yearlings, prices were down only 10-15% from the previous year. Now they're down more than 30%. That has to squeeze the pinhookers' margins, and makes the outlooks for this coming summer's yearling sales even bleaker
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