Explore horse racing’s new frontier with Jeff Seder of EQB. Discover his groundbreaking Moneyball-inspired tactics, challenging pedigree norms for investment success in this dynamic industry
Connect with Ben Fraser on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/benwfraser/
Connect with Jeff Seder on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/jseder/
Invest Like a Billionaire podcast is sponsored by Aspen Funds which focuses on macro-driven alternative investments for accredited investors. https://aspenfunds.us/
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Transcription
Disrupting the Horse Racing Industry: A New Approach
Jeff Seder: I am an industry disruptor.
They’re all pedigree and all their inventories and all their everything is on the pedigree. And it’s a lousy predictor.
Ben Fraser: What are the things that you’re looking for biologically at that kind of first point to make a decision?
Jeff Seder: That we’ve got the film, we’ve got internal organ scans.
We’re looking down the throat, we’re x raying them. We do look at their pedigree. Pedigree horses are self fulfilling often because they get the best trainers and the best veterinarians and the best everything. But it’s not a good predictor. You’re gonna tell me you can’t throw snake eyes twice, or you can’t throw it three times in a row.
It happens, but you gotta be there to look. You can’t look at the catalog page that describes the pedigree. You must look at the horse. Low probability events happen, and I’ve got the tech to find them.
Welcome to Invest Like a Billionaire Podcast
Ben Fraser: Hello, Future Billionaires! Welcome to another episode of the Invest Like a Billionaire podcast. We’ve got a fun episode for you today and great timing with the Kentucky Derby just behind us.
This is a fun episode.
Introducing Jeff Seder: The Moneyball of Horse Racing
Ben Fraser: We’re going to talk to Jeff Seder of EQB. I was super excited about this episode because I’m personally a huge fan, just of horses in general. They’re a cool animal. Horse racing has always been something that’s been appealing to me for multiple levels.
The Flaws of Pedigree in Horse Selection
Ben Fraser: And Jeff has been in this space for over four years and he is taking the concepts of Moneyball data analytics and using that to create better selection criteria for finding the horses that will be the winners.
He’s been doing this for a long time as his own proprietary database. And he talks all about this, the world of horse racing, why pedigree is not the end all be all, and how he goes about looking at horses. Is that why? It sets the stage of what it looks like to get into this space as an investor who wants to go big in the race horsing space.
I think you’re really going to enjoy this episode. I thought it was really fun. A little bit different than some of the things we do. But again, our goal here is to educate and help you enjoy. Thanks so much.
This is the Invest Like a Billionaire podcast, where we uncover the alternative investments and strategies that billionaires use to grow wealth. The podcast will make you a better investor And help you build legacy wealth. Join us as we dive into the world of alternative investments, uncover strategies of the ultra wealthy, discuss economics, and interview successful investors.
Welcome back to a repetitive of the Invest like a Billionaire podcast. This is Ben Fraser, your host today, and I’m joined by our guest Jeffrey Seder. We’re excited to have him on, he’s with EQB, and it’s actually great timing to bring you on because we just, as we’re recording this, had the Kentucky Derby last weekend.
So horse racing is on a lot of people’s minds. And invest like a billionaire, right? The point of the show is to talk about different things that the ultra wealthy are doing to make a return that are outside of doxification. And you’ve been in this space for over 40 years. Yeah. Thanks for coming on the show and tell us a little bit about your background and what you’re doing in this space of horse racing.
Jeff Seder: Thank you very much for having me.
Jeff Seder’s Revolutionary Techniques and Success Stories
Jeff Seder: And I’m really the money ball at horse racing, although I predate moneyball for like 20 years, bringing big data analytics and science and professional management to try and select young, unraced horses and and then manage them through the racing career.
And I started out working with the United States Olympic sports medicine committee when it was first created. And I learned a lot and decided we could do this with horses where it’s been an eyeball and intuition for 300 years and a very small click and 99 percent of the people were losing money.
A lot of them didn’t care because they had so much, but I said, I can do better and have paid a lot less. I paid at or below auction prices for my major clients, and made them money. And we won the first trickle crown in 37 years with one of the horses out of the program. With American Pharoah in 2015, it was on the front page of the New York Times, the article about it.
And if you turn to the center, you see a picture. And I tell people it was easy, it only took 35 years and several million dollars of private research and starving for the first 20 years while we built databases and equipment and did the research. When I left the Olympics as a sports medicine, I thought I would just adapt the technologies, but that the data did not exist on elite resources and the equipment to gather the data didn’t exist.
Along the way, I had to invent the portable ultrasound machine for the heart. Imaging, it’s now commercial and the first heart rate monitor that would be accurate on the galloping horse, slow motion films digitized, and we had to invent the digitizing software and then we gave it to the Olympic people and now you see it everywhere.
Stick figures and multiple photos, and so it’s been a long ride creating a lot of different modalities of sports medicine. And I hooked up early with someone named Patrice Miller who was a trainer. And she’d been on horses since she was two years old, bouncing on the back of a horse with her grandmother in a basket.
And then she became a jockey, one of the first women jockeys in the United States, lied about her age. And then she was a trainer and was a leading trainer and set track records, one of which stood for 20 years in Monmouth Park. And so she’s anchored us. So we were eggheads until she got here.
So I say, I look at the altimeter and she looks out the window to see if we’re off the ground. And so the combination of me and her, and lately we’ve added a handicap who’s invented ways to invent what they call sheet number kind of things. And so you could look at horses on different tracks, different distances, different days, different conditions, and compare the performances to try when they came together with numbers.
His name’s Michael Kipnis, he’s also known as The Wizard. You can find his stuff on the Daily Racing Forum website. So the combination is powerful, and the people who actually would like to win and not pay a fortune, we’re right. I liken it to a, the industry to like, if you wanted to go into yap racing.
We’re having a yacht and you can either pay a fortune and maybe never get the yacht out of the slip very often, or you can have it around a lot and do it right and not pay very much at all. And all the yachts in horse racing have a lottery ticket in the hall, which can be a bazillion bucks, but we can’t promise a lottery ticket or we’ve hit it more than once, but we can tell you to play the game.
We win a lot of our clients to make money or don’t spend much to play the game. So that’s what I do.
Ben Fraser: No. So it is so cool. You said at the beginning, which I love the phrase you used, which is, the Moneyball of horse racing. And so for those that are, haven’t seen the movie or the, or read the book and aren’t familiar with that story, it was basically bucking against the trends of how you selected players before, which was usually looking at it to go, he kept that looking at j.
Physical size and speed and other things that ultimately didn’t necessarily translate to winning games. And what you’re doing is taking that approach of skewing the normal kind of stats or pedigree that a lot of people look at trying to select horses and looking at other data points that actually might be more predictive.
So talk a little bit about that, of how the current industry is set up to where it’s really. Focused on pedigree, right? You’re, Oh, I’m the.
Jeff Seder: Absolutely. Now the big prices on pedigree, or if they go to a two year old auction, we can see him run. It’s on who ran the fastest, where they run an eighth of a mile or a quarter of a mile.
Big deal. You won the first half of the race with that horse. Yeah. It’s the end. I am an industry disruptor. I am not popular. They’re all their pedigree and all their inventories and all their, everything is on the pedigree. And it’s a lousy predictor. Like 95 percent of the million dollar stallions, a million dollar mayors, 95 percent of what comes out is Not a great racehorse.
And if we couldn’t beat those stats, we’d be out of business immediately. So yeah, we can do a lot better because like at the Olympics, we didn’t look at the parents, we looked at the athlete and they’d say the pedigree and the best pedigree horses are self fulfilling often because they get the best trainers and the best veterinarians and the best everything.
It’s not a good predictor. And. Even if it is, and they said, so often I’m bucking the pedigree thing and they say, I can’t do it with that pedigree. Can’t go the distance, can’t do this, can’t do turf. And I say, listen, you’re going to tell me you can’t throw snake eyes twice, or you can’t throw it three times in a row.
It happens, but you got to be there to look. You can’t look at the catalog page that describes the pedigree. You must look at the horse. Low probability events happen and I’ve got the tech to find them. And not only is that nice because it means you can win more. But it also means you pay less because the market’s not evaluating them.
So it’s good, but it’s really a closed industry and it’s very traditional. And I’m still pretty unpopular. I have won the triple crown. I’ve won the Kentucky Derby twice for clients and it’s been second and first. I had five entries out of 20. Your chances of getting into the Kentucky Derby once in a lifetime are infinitesimal.
We had five of our clients get qualified once. In the starting gate at 20 yards. And people still don’t, they think we have theories, or who they are or they go to somebody who is a cheap imitation, doesn’t have the data, doesn’t have the technicians. They have to file it in the instruction book, but they can’t play a symphony.
Ben Fraser: So what’s the appeal of pedigree, right? As for me, I love horses. I think they’re one of the coolest animals God created, but don’t know much about horse racing. I don’t know what constitutes a good horse. I’ve seen the movie secretariat.
I’ve seen other big movies. Seabiscuit, now you see oh, this is the great grandson. Of secretariat or whatever. And that automatically creates that connection of offspring, or this is an offspring of a woody horse. Is that really what it is or is there some physical dynamics about it where secretariat like a bigger heart or something, right?
Jeff Seder: It’s not one thing and that’s the other thing. People find something that’s predictive, whether it’s scientific or otherwise, and they fall in love with it and they try and do it. But you’re not really looking for the best pedigree or the best heart or the best gait. If the chain holding the Queen Mary has one link that’s made out of papier mâché, that’s where it breaks.
In the Olympic stuff, you’re looking for the hole. The great horses don’t have the best, everything. And, but they’ve got a good, everything there, no holes. And so my job is looking for the holes. I don’t get carried away with the best this or that secretary. And one of the things they got right in the movie was he wanted to run.
He wanted to win. When I was younger and thinner, I actually exercised horses, racehorses in the morning. We would go out to the farm and groups of five or six. And some you had to strangle them to keep them from getting to the front when they weren’t supposed to be yet and run it off. And some, you had You know, keep working on them to get them to keep up.
And it wasn’t the ability that was the difference. So the attitude makes a big difference. There are no free agents. So you also want to be able to spot who gives a damn. Although it’s a whole lot easier to give a damn if you’re not hurting. And it doesn’t hurt to run. And you don’t get as exhausted, and there it’s a big deal. Bigger lungs, bigger spleen. Blood dopes them naturally. It’s an incredible thing that they can do to themselves. Like the Russians used to do cheating with blood doping. They have bigger lungs, they have bigger spleens, they have straighter legs. Their gait is more efficient.
Their hearts are 50 percent bigger and pump more. There’s a lot different about the elite. When I was with the Olympics, one of the things I learned was the elite athletes were as different medically from normal as normal is from sick or injured. So you can’t assume you know what the hell is going on until you gather the data on those elite athletes and I’ve got four years of that, so I know the differences.
And yeah, pedigree, everybody’s still in love with pedigree, it’s romantic. It doesn’t really, I mean it’s not silly, but it’s not very powerful. It’s 95 percent of the very most expensive mark of the best, million dollar, multi million dollar stallions and multi million dollar mirrors. 95 percent of them aren’t very good racehorses.
Why? You can’t work on that basis. So think about it. What makes a horse a phenomenal champion? Why is it different? 99. 9 percent of the rest of the world probably has recessive genes to do that, or it wouldn’t be so rare. And if the recessive, what good does it do to chase it unless you’re lucky and somehow you match it up with the other recessive.
And there’s different kinds of champions, there’s, the spreaders in the distance and the turf and the dirt and this and that. And there’s some horses in the past that just built their reputation on cocaine before the testing. And now it’s much more sophisticated, but they still have a few, they caught a horse that was disqualified from the Kentucky Derby one or two years ago.
And in other words, the major stallion and his traders in jail because he was, and that they’re right there in the sled book doing their thing, how legitimate is that? And half of them are on LASIK. So they get this thing called epistasis epistaxis, what they. They hemorrhage in their lungs and their trachea and they choke and they can’t go at distance because of that.
And, like 70, 80 percent of the horses are on medication to deal with that. There’s someone, covering up this problem and then passing it on. So yeah, pedigrees, it’s romantic and it’s totally believed in by the majority of the experts, but it’s That’s why i’m the industry disruptor.
It’s so powerful like My track record can’t even overcome it And i’m doing you know, 10 times better than the other guy But then everybody lies about the track record or they show you the one horse The experts write once and people you can verify the track records But most people don’t well, I mean it’s name and running. It’s an industry of rascals. There’s a lot of Yeah.
Ben Fraser: Yeah. I didn’t actually watch the Kentucky Derby this year, but what I heard from multiple people is that the top three horses weren’t even the big names on the list, right? The ones that ended up.
Jeff Seder: Heavy favorite was 15th.
He just stopped. Nobody knows, maybe it was lame or something. And a guy smacked through a rail. So he ran probably, I don’t know, many yards less than anybody else had it because you got the rail trip. And he cost 40, 000 and he was running against a horse that cost 2. 5 million and he beat him.
But he actually ran, didn’t run as far, but he beat him by this much. That’s three, a five million dollar person beat him by this much. And why? Because his jockey was smart and his trainer’s a genius, Kenny McPeak. And they studied the pre, they got the rail, they got the one hole. So they knew they were going to be on the rail.
They studied the last guy who pulled off 50 to 1 from the rail. A 50 to 1 offset wouldn’t mind that the bird was Calvin Burrell was a jockey and they actually got together with him. They studied him and they decided they were going to pull off the same thing if they could. The problem with that strategy is at the right point, you have to have a hole to come through.
The hole was the size of the crack under your door, and if it does, if it closes, you, there’s a collision and you can die. But he took him at the teeny old and bang, he went right through and bingo and Ducky Durbin to the working class horse with the smart guy training and jockey. Good for them.
They beat the bazillion, the billionaire’s horse. They paid 2. 4 million as a baby because of the pedigree.
Ben Fraser: Yeah. I had this at a point or two, it’s like you, when you’re using data, which gives you better predictive. Insights, but the other piece of it to your earlier point is the market’s not paying for that, right?
You have a war.
Jeff Seder: I advise them up. I try to get them a pedigree. I try my best to get them something that does well and we’ll have a pedigree that’s at least enough to get a lot of money. I hate it, but I stay away from the ones with it. No pedigree, even if I think they’re terrific because it screws your giant client.
Even if he wins, it’s not worth it. I’m sorry, but I do pay attention to the market purse, for the business part of it, I’m paying attention very sharply to pedigree, but not when I’m trying to find the app.
Ben Fraser: Yeah. For my perspective, from the investing side of things. If you’re going after pedigree, you’re going to pay a premium, a pretty, pretty petty to get one horse.
And then like you said, you’re getting the best trainers, best.
Jeff Seder: Between 40 thousand and 2 million. It can be differences in pedigree, not the horse.
Ben Fraser: And Hey, what’d you think that 2 million to spread it across, 20 different horses and get you to pay the same amount. And you’re increasing your eyes substantially and potentially using better insight. So
Jeff Seder: I’ve done it. It’s not a theory. I’ve done it for clients. I can actually show them a complete list of everything I bought from some client, how much it costs, what it earned, what it was resold for. Again, I can document the story. It works.
Ben Fraser: What’s some of the magic or a secret sauce, right? This is your proprietary.
Jeff Seder: The secret sauce like I say, I could give you the violin and the instruction book, but it asked me. It plays a symphony, but we buy horses that we know what they’re supposed to look like, how their shape, the angles and the lengths of the different limb segments. And they, we know how they’re supposed to walk. We know when they, when slow motion, when they’re running, whether it’s clean, whether it wastes energy.
Oh, and whether it’s safe or not that most of them in the answer is no to both. We know that their heart is bigger than it’s going to be as much as 50 percent bigger with pumping and thick walls of their heart. We know their spleen in the horse. They ring their spleen when they leave the gate, when they get excited and they dump an extra 70 percent red blood cells into their heart.
bloodstream and that’s an enormous effect on endurance. That’s what the Russians were doing in the early Olympic blood doping scan, but the horse does it naturally from evolution. So when the wolves came and they had to go from nothing to bang, from running, they could do that. And then we have trainers.
A lot of the lamenesses are very subtle. So we have heart rate meters on them, and you can tell if their heart rate is higher on one, they’re different leads, one right, left, left, right hand, left, and if it’s higher on one lead than the other at the track, you know that something hurts even before you can see it.
So you have to, you can’t run them better, they do get hurt. And it helps with diabetes. We use all the latest diagnostic tools up to and including pets that we don’t run a horse with a subtle lameness because if you do that It hurts and then they’re creatures of habit. They learn that if they try hard it hurts.
They ain’t trying hard and then there’s the diet and everything. Yeah, it all, it’s a lot of people, a lot, even our blacksmiths, if they put the nail in and the horse and soar, you, and there’s a lot of horses aren’t all the same, their goods are all different and this and that.
Yeah, there’s just so much. But when you get a good team, a good vet, a good blacks, good trader, and it’s raised on a farm with a greeter who knows what the hell they’re doing. My farm. It’s 200 acres and it looks pastoral . Just know God’s nature. But it’s not, you know, we spend 40 years in the pasture, our only grass is no nematodes.
No tall festoons. It’s all perennial, right? There’s all the things that can affect the warts of self lying disease nothing. It’s all been carefully eliminated and all the ways they get hurt are out there And we don’t have anybody who doesn’t know what they’re doing. Selling these barns, honest to God, they pay a million bucks for the horse.
And the guy leading it around the shed row in the racetrack is a, is a M as a, I did the table pay low minimum wage. What are they doing? What? And you can hurt the horse in a heartbeat.
Ben Fraser: Yeah, there’s so much of it from your standpoint is nature versus nurture, right? How much of it is just biologically, physiologically, the horses system structure stride is predisposed to make them
Jeff Seder: It’s a hundred percent nature to begin with but there’s a thousand ways to screw it up and people find them So that it’s a rare guy who knows what to do with that Rare already, some of the trainers they’re great horse where they’re crappy managers So they can’t manage all the things that lines we try they get 200 300 horses How can that possibly pay all the attention each one?
They don’t, so who does? That’s what you should be asking yourself. It’s, and the ride I, we’ve had horses that should have won the Kentucky Derby and the ride finished them off. I could have described to you what goes wrong. There’s a, there’s this they run up, they can’t time it.
They don’t know the time. They go up and they end up running up somebody’s rear end and having to stop in order to start again. So you have to take the inertial momentum of a thousand pound animal and re, restart it. It doesn’t work or they get banged. We had one horse was a low odds in the konecky derby and he had the one on she didn’t We had the product she didn’t clear the field and she didn’t drop back So the whole field came over on her and gave him a new racing stripe scraped along the rail on his side He never read.
It’s just so many things that can go wrong. So I don’t know. It’s nature nurtured. It’s a waste of your time to have good team work on a horse that isn’t the elite horse, right? But the elite horse ain’t enough. You need the team, the out team.
Ben Fraser: So go into the natural side of it. You do buy young horses, right?
And you absolutely. I work with an article aspect. So we think this has good chances. It has at least the. The material that we can work with, to have a chance.
The Science Behind Selecting a Champion Horse
Ben Fraser: So what are the things that you’re looking for biologically at that kind of first point to make a decision that, yeah this.
Jeff Seder: First of all, we’ve got DNA markers now that we’ve generated from our databases about the strength of the heart and the thickness of the wall muscle and other things about them.
So we have some DNA stuff. Secondly, we get a two year old and a training cell I’m going to next week. Horses will run by. We will video them in high definition slow motion and take those videos and take them apart and look for how, whether they move their, throw their legs around inefficiently, whether they, or everything’s straight or whether the angle is gonna cause chips and all kinds of things in their bum, they chip their knees, they chip their, as well as their ankles.
So we, we’re looking for all those, we have x rays to make sure they’re all together. We look down their throat with an endoscope to see the function of their larynx. The longest nerve in nature is the front in these horses. This goes from the base of the brain all the way down their neck and then all the way back against what’s called recurrent laryngeal and then back to their larynx.
And it fails in a lot of the horses. And when it does, when they get under stress and they’re running hard, it closes their airway and they can’t breathe. So they stop. And it has a lot of horses. You got to know. You can see in advance whether it’s a flaccid epiglottis or a whole larynx function or whether it’s Displacing or like they call it displacing and you have to weed those, there are operations for that But why buy a problem and so we’ve got the film.
We’ve got the internal organ scans. We’re looking down the throat. We’re x raying them. We do look at the pedigree Just to see if the mare has produced any, anything. She’s had nine foals and nobody did anything. She may be teaching that baby before it leaves her. Whatever it is, he shouldn’t know.
Like they’ll dry hard. And so that’s a bad sign. There’s just a long chat, but we go through everything. Then you have to pass every single test or they’re out. We are not going to take a weak link in that chain. That weak link is where it breaks.
Ben Fraser: So how do you look at the qualitative measures?
You said, yeah, the thing about the secretariat at the gold forum is he just wanted to run, right? How do you find that?
Jeff Seder: It’s very hard, but I’ll tell you, give me some stories. We had one horse, so we went to see the farmer. They were like, I don’t know, a lot of yearlings, like 20, 30 yearlings in this field.
And they call them into food and they all come right up to the gate, right? And then the red seat parts and there’s one that comes forward. And we said, God damn, that’s a dominant animal. We wanted to, and she became the chief. It was another one in club fights. We went out in the field to see the year and there was only one horse out there with a long tail a year.
Nobody. Nobody was biting and pulling on his tail. We bought him and he did it and I bought one named pinky piwinski and I went to the store. We’ve done all this shit and then I went to the stall before the auction to look at him. I just wanted to see. I want to stare at him. I’m staring at his presence and I’m meditating, close my eyes and look at him and he looks up at me and I swear to god what he said was, what are you looking at?
And I said, that’s the guy. That’s what I want. And that’s who he was. That’s who he was. You couldn’t, you’re not gonna beat him staring him down, man. You had to run him down. He came within like a 10th of a second of a 20-year-old track record at Laro that was set on the grass by a legend.
Kelso was Horse of the year, like six times. That was wild. And he had a lousy pedigree. Not lousy, but nothing special. But why he was, he, if you’re going to be there, you had to run and he was never flustered. He was in the back, everybody crowded and blah, blah, blah. You didn’t give it. He just, if he is a chair, I love that horse.
Investing in Racehorses: Strategies and Returns
Ben Fraser: So how do you make money as someone that invests in horse racehorses, right? Obviously if you win a race, you’re making some money for the pride of winning.
Jeff Seder: It’s a breeding step. The money. These days there’s so many multi million dollar races, that’s not so true anymore.
Breeding, traditionally, has been the way to make your money. It’s better to buy females, the fillies, because a big stadium will cover maybe 200 mares, 250 mares a year. And, and so you’re going to have 200, 250 times as many multi million dollar worthwhile mares. that you can develop that you have to get to the top stallions as you can the top stallions.
So why not buy the mares? And so that’s, so that’s one strategy. And we buy mares that people want. They can make their own pedigree. If they win big races, people want that as a pedigree. The stallion, it’s different from that. Nobody really believes it honestly is a mid classic pedigree.
So it’s easier to buy the fillies and they can make their own pedigree, but we make sure that they have a nut so that nobody will be a freak. And we’re after reselling the horses and we’ve resold a lot of horses over a million bucks and some of them for many millions of dollars. And that’s the big paydee.
That’s get out horse. The other thing, the other rule of thumb is don’t, if you’re going to buy one or two horses, I have a lot of fun, but that’s not business. Let’s say you either have a team or you don’t, you have to buy enough horses. The odds can work for you.
Ben Fraser: Right? Oh, you’re saying make your own pedigree.
You mean the horses are winning. So now they have,
Jeff Seder: Yeah, if you win a grade one race, 100 grade one, what are called grade one races like the Kentucky Derby or the world championships, a hundred grade one races in the world a year. And if you win one or two of those with your mayor, unless it’s by truck out West, it’s, they’re going to think that they’re going to want that mayor.
Somebody’s going to pay a lot of money because they’re going to breed. Got it. Got it. When I say they say by the stallion’s name and then out of the mares by secretariat out of I don’t know madcap escapades So that’s why I was the joke is by truck out of list for the horses with no milk.
Ben Fraser: Okay, my last question so in our industry, you know We have a colloquialism that it’s if not the horse is the jockey and the idea is You know when you’re Investing in a property, you want to look at the property.
You want to make sure it’s got good models, a good location, but how you manage that property is the bigger, the best driver, right? I don’t know how much that holds true in horse racing. I know.
Jeff Seder: More than as much or more than anywhere else because there’s so many baloney bullshit artists or guys who just rascals and proceed without the proper management, which doesn’t usually happen.
You really don’t have a shot. There’s too many ways it goes wrong. That’s so you really need to get somebody a you can trust and b that has done it proven they can do it not once But you know repeatedly or you’re really you’ll pay too much and your odds will be poor I don’t care what the horse.
I don’t care if it’s the secretary. I honestly think there’s a lot of trainers who wouldn’t do well as secretary. There’s too many things. They would have done wrong.
Ben Fraser: Yeah So how do you attract a good jockey to a non pedigreed horse, right? You start.
Jeff Seder: First of all, you got to have your trainer. If you got the right trainers and we have those relationships, the trainer will tell the jock, this guy’s for real.
You want to be there. I want to win. So the trainer will tell them, when the horse is in his workouts and in this and that, they’re in our tracker. So when we go to somebody like Bob Baffert or one of the top trainers, Bill Mott, and we say, this is, this is as good as we’ve ever found.
And you’re a trainer, there’s no problem. Get a good job, get a good job. They want to ride.
Ben Fraser: So if someone wants to go after this, it’s Hey, I like this. I want to put some money here. I want to go try this out. Obviously you have the upfront costs of buying the horses, but then what’s the ongoing costs with the trainers with just,
Jeff Seder: We have, I can give them examples of what other people do, but of course, anywhere from four to 5, 000 a month for each race, keep at the trainer.
Yeah. Okay, you’re going to spend 40, 000 to the sky’s the limit to buy the horse and and if he’s if it’s a decent horse She’ll probably be in a 15 20 grand before you’ll have a chance to earn anything back But if he’s decent horse within the first year, he should break even and then start earning money And some of them get hurt, some of them get sick and some of them don’t give a shit.
So you need more than one horse, but we tell people you should buy anywhere from five to 10. And then you’re, if you’ve got the right people, you’re going to probably have a good run, have some fun. Probably not a little bit, probably if you won’t lose much money, but you, and you may make a lot, but it’s a risk return.
It’s a high risk, high return industry. Yeah. Yeah. I think those are the numbers. Cool. We’ve had clients who put in 40 million. We had one to put in 40 million. Five years later, it was 64 million. And he won all over and he batted out of a ride. Good time. He won everything there was to win.
So he, I think he thought he was having a good time having worth as wild. Hey, I think you have some that don’t listen to you. They use three or four different agents. I have one guy we put him like a million dollars for the horses and they earned back a million and a half, but he spent 3 million with other agents on other cuffs and didn’t do anything.
So he lost money. So he thought, ah, this is over. I think he jumped off. Give me a break. Just what do I have to do?
Connecting with Jeff Seder and Final Thoughts
Ben Fraser: Jeff was a bit really fun. I appreciate you coming on and sharing some of your knowledge. What’s the best way for folks to get all to you and learn about what you do?
Jeff Seder: The best way to get all to me is I guess our website or my cell phone.
The website’s just EQB, like Equine Biometrics, but it’s not com, it’s FYI. FYI. And my cell phone, I guess it’s LinkedIn or something.
Ben Fraser: You have an email, right?
Jeff Seder: I have an email. It’s just my name, J. Seder, J S E D E R. J S E D, as in dog, E R, at E Q B dot F Y I, and if you, if people want to put their toe in the cold water, we have people we trust to do partnerships with, and we can direct them there.
They can have a piece of one horse, learn something about the industry that way, too, or have some fun. You don’t have to, you don’t have to jump in right away, and we like to talk horses, so we’re happy to talk to people. And we’re at the auctions. Meet us at the auctions. Meet us at the racetracks.
It’s better than a cubicle in the insurance building.
I wanted to be outside. I wanted to work with Orson. I wanted to be outside. Yeah. Thank you, God.
Ben Fraser: That’s awesome. Appreciate you coming on the show and definitely love what you’re doing and it’s fun to highlight some of the cool insights that you’ve Discovered in the past few decades and definitely sharing the love of horses.
So appreciate you coming out.
Jeff Seder: I’ve really appreciated this opportunity. Thank you very much.
Ben Fraser: All right. Thanks so much.
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