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Where horses change hands and how the smart money behaves when they do. Reading a sale catalog, what the under-tack show actually tells you, and how to walk into Keeneland or Fasig-Tipton without overpaying for a pedigree.
A foal is any Thoroughbred under one year old, of either sex; a colt is a male horse four years old or younger. That is the whole muddle in one line: foal, weanling, yearling, and 2-year-old are age stages, while…
Pinhooking in horse racing means buying a young horse — usually a weanling or a yearling — and reselling it at a later auction for a profit, without racing it. You are betting the horse will present better at the…
A pre-purchase exam you commission with your own vet — reading the repository films before the hammer falls — is the closest thing you get to the truth about a horse at a sale. The sale catalog is an advertisement.…
A horse sale catalog is the single most important document you will read before you bid: it is an advertisement written to a strict standard, not an independent report on the horse, and what is missing from a page often…
From a buyer’s seat, a yearling horse is a young Thoroughbred in its second calendar year — unraced, usually unbroken — judged on pedigree, conformation, and how it walks across a sales ring. The first thing most prospective owners want…
The real answer to why you’d put a horse in a claiming race is to run it where it can actually win — against horses of roughly equal value — accepting a defined chance of losing the horse for a…
If you want to know how to claim a racehorse, start here: claiming is the only way to buy a racehorse where you commit to the full price before you are allowed to lay a hand on the animal. You…
Yes — entering a claiming race means agreeing to sell your horse at the claiming price (the “tag”). Any licensed owner at that track can buy it by dropping a claim slip before the race; under most state racing rules,…
Most of the racehorses bought and sold in America never see an auction ring. They change hands in the middle of a race — for a price the seller set in advance, to a buyer who may have decided to…