On Thoroughbreds

Iain,

Interesting points. I’m no expert on horse racing but my understanding is that the the races in the American Triple Crown of Thoroughbred Racing are. . . .limited to thoroughbreds. I’d assume that the same is so for the British and Irish Triple Crowns. So, by definition, I’d think that no non-thoroughbred has ever won. The values of racehorses remain high and will continue to go up for at least three reasons:

First, like all sports, racing has arbitrary rules that change slowly if at all. And one of them is that horses must have specific bloodlines. I’d suspect that we would see little change even if times started getting decidedly worse. It’s just the rules of the game.

Second, it’s likely that thoroughbreds are still the fastest horses around.

Last, race horses as “prestige” assets for that multi-millionaires the same way that people with hundreds of millions buy vineyards and people with billions start new airlines and buy big league sports teams. The return on all of these investments is pretty bad on the whole but there’s prestige and “club membership” that goes along with having them. Also, of course, the very rich–often not without reason–have egos that let them think they can earn the outsize returns that a few lucky people with these assets manage to collect.

Enormous race horse prices, of course, still carry a lot of information but it’s not necessarily information about the likelihood of winning or even of making money.