It's an exciting time of the year, with four new horses purchased at OBS March and racing action heating up. The market at OBS March, while not down a lot from last year’s record numbers, was clearly soft as we had predicted, especially in the middle “commercial” market. Take out the top 20 Hips sold to billionaires with play money, and almost everyone agreed it was a buyer’s market (which we took great advantage of!) To quote the article from The Blood-Horse, “Following a robust day of trading Wednesday, OBS reported an overall two-day gross of $51,650,000 for 325 head sold, down from the $55,432,000 total in 2015 for the same number sold. The two-day average fell from $170,560 to $158,923 and the median price declined slightly to $100,000 from $105,000. The RNA rate, which will change as OBS reports private sales, was 25%, compared with 23% a year ago”. Shows that the horse market continues to follow the stock market and the economy in general. Hey, racehorses are bought with leisure money, when people in the oil patch who love horses are struggling to keep their rigs operating (to cite just one example), they don’t show up at OBS, at least not with the usual amount of money to spend.

For Kenwood Racing, it was a very intense and busy and interesting 3 days, long and tough but exciting, and it all paid off with the purchase of four exceptional horses at true value prices, including one of the best bred, most attractive, best moving horses we have ever purchased, a filly, by the top sire Awesome Again. We spent $100,000 for her, the most ever for a two year old for our co-owner program, and we think she was worth every penny. Time will tell on that, but the kicker was she’s a New York-Bred on top of her great looks, pedigree and way of moving. A video is worth a million words about her, take a look at her video.

The next day we struck again with the purchase of our top rated colt, by the hot young sire To Honor and Serve, a horse we valued at $75,000+ who sold for just $50,000. He’s stunning too, take a look at his video.

Add to that two more colts purchased for bargain prices by two great young sires, The Factor and Gone Astray, and we went home with 4 horses we loved, for a lot less than we planned to spend. We came with a budget of $300,000 and spent just over $200,000 for the horses we really wanted. Enough said!

A large group of partners and co-owners were with us from the start at the sale and can attest to the work done and the process that produced these results. This elite sale this year, just as we predicted in our blog post, Two Year Old Sales - A look at the market, with a slightly less robust stock market, and a decline in participation from owners tied to the oil industry, offered a rare opportunity to buy really good horses at unusually affordable prices and we think we did just that.

Turning to racing news, Title Fight ran a much improved race March 19th at Penn National, finishing a closing 2^nd while coming on fast at the end. He was a well beaten 3^rd against weaker in his debut at Penn last time and he beat the horse who finished 2^nd ahead of him last time easily this time, so he’s heading in the right direction and we think we’re in a position to win some races with him this year.

Huamantla, Sonny’s Pharoah and Long May You Run all worked really well at Penn National this week. Huamantla is super sharp, we are thinking she might be ready to run in early April. Long May You Run as good as ever, looks like late April for him. Mark worked Sonny’s Pharoah against a tough older horse who has won $300,000 in his career. He is older and coming off a layoff, but the fact she stayed with him easily every step of the way says a lot, 3 year old fillies rarely do that. She had a world of talent last year and appears to have really matured. She should be ready by end of April also, while it’s too soon to get really high on her after a few works, we’ll admit we are eager to see her run.

April sale at OBS is next!