Buying Wins at the Sales
By: Tom Wilson
Tags: Bloodstock, Gambling, Investing, Betting, Horse Racing

Introduction

Since Moneyball, i’ve been largely obsessed with the translation of concepts used in Sabermetrics and wider Sports Analytics into the sport of Horse Racing. In this article we aim to convey a methods utilized in other sports can be applied to thoroughbred analysis, thus allowing for identification of value in the bloodstock markets and sales rings across the UK & Ireland.

We believe that by better understanding of the variables that influence thoroughbred performance that investors can identify and realize greater value opportunities at the sales.

Data

All race data is taken from Flat & All Weather races in the UK and Ireland since 2010.

All sales data is taken from sales in the UK & Ireland since January 2017. This was compiled manually by aggregating sales results across the Tattersalls and Goffs Auction houses together.

Winners-to-Runners Ratio

What proportion of sires’ runners end up winning at the track?

We will start with the traditional metric, Winners-to-Runners Ratio. WTRR assesses the % of runners from a sires’ progeny that end up winning on the track.

Intriguing aspects, even as we begin, as we see that two “newer” sires in the form of War Front and Frankel top the Winners-To-Runners rankings. War Front displays an impressive record with 68.0% of his total runners hitting the track in the UK & Ireland recording a race victory. Frankel continues to back up his stallion credentials with a 65.7% winners-to-runners ratio and Scat Daddy rounds out the top 3 with a record of 64.4% winners-to-runners ratio. Dubawi is impressive in fourth due to his durability — a 63.8% WTRR over a large sample size of 853 horses since 2010.

Perhaps most impressive is the ability of Galileo and Dubawi to sustain their WTRR after such a large number of progeny have raced. If Frankel and War Front can sustain a similar level of performance when approaching 1000 progeny hitting the track, then they will lay claim to stand with the greats.

Sales Prices

In order to bring a comparison between on track performance and value throughout the sales ring, we have also compiled records of all bloodstock purchases across the UK & Ireland since the start of 2017.

The breakdown below shows the average (mean) sales price of progeny going through the sales ring in this time period. This will come in useful later on.

Winners-to-Runners Ratio x Sales Price

In order to bring some further context to the winners-to-runners ratio, and also the opportunity to identify some value, we correlated the WTRR performance vs. the average purchase price of progeny through the sales ring since 2017. Of interest are the horses with a below average sales price, but an above average WTRR. Pay particular attention to the positions of Lope De Vega, Pivotal, Exceed and Excel, Kodiac and Holy Roman Emperor.

A Pearson correlation of 0.529 shows that there is a moderate correlation between Average Sales Price and Winners to Runners Ratio.

Throughout this piece I will use some simple Linear Regression equations to calculate an “Expectancy” level based on the various factors that we will explore.

Due to a necessity to remove outliers for this type of data analysis, as it causes skew, Galileo has been removed from the analysis below. Our Linear Regression model shows the comparison between actual performance in terms of winners on the track vs. a calculated expected performance based on average sales price. All results have then been adjusted to 100 runners to allow for consistent analysis across the sample sires of the different sires analysed.

The top 5 sires delivering “above expectation” in terms of winning runners when compared to average sales price are as follows: