How Data Analytics is Revolutionizing Horse Racing feat. 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.

So one of the things that you're looking for biologically at that kind of first point to make a decision—

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 is kind of 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 going to tell me you can't throw Snake Eyes twice. Where you can't throw it 3 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.

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. I'm going to talk with Jeff Sater of EQB. I was super excited about this episode because I'm personally a huge fan just of horses in general. I think they're a cool animal. I mean, horse racing has always been something that's been appealing to me for multiple levels. And Jeff has been in this space for over 40 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, has his own proprietary database, and he talks all about just the world of horse racing, why pedigree is not the end-all be-all and how he goes about looking at horses. It really kind of sets the stage of what it looks like to get into this space as an investor who wants to kind of go big in the racehorse space. I think you're really going to enjoy this episode. I thought it's really fun, a little bit different, right, than some of the things we do. But again, our goal here is to educate and hope you enjoy. Thanks so much.

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Welcome back to another episode of the Invest Like a Billionaire podcast. This is Ben Fraser, your host today, and I'm joined by our guest, uh, Jeffrey Thayer. Super excited to have him on. He's with EQB, and, uh, it's actually great timing, uh, to bring you on, uh, because we just, as we're recording this, had the Kentucky Derby last weekend. Um, so race, uh, horse racing is on a lot of people's minds, and Investing Like a Billionaire, right, the point of the show is to talk about different things that ultra-wealthy are doing to, you know, make a return that are outside of stocks and funds. And, uh, you've been in this space for over 40 years, Jeff. So, uh, thanks for coming on the show and, um, tell us a little about your background and kind of what, what you're doing in this, uh, space, uh, horse racing.

Thank you very much for having me. And I'm, uh, I was really the Moneyball of horse racing, although I predate Moneyball like 20 years. Bringing big data, uh, analytics and science and professional management to try and, uh, select young unraced horses and, uh, and then manage them through the racing career. And I worked with, uh, started out working with the United States Olympic Sports Medicine Committee when it was first created, and I learned a lot and decided, you know, we could do this with horses where it's been eyeball and intuition for 300 years and a very small clique And, uh, and that 99% of the people were losing money. A lot of them didn't care because they had so much. But I was, uh, I said I can do better, and I have. I have. I've, uh, I paid a lot less. I paid at or below auction prices for my major clients, made them money. And we won the first Triple Crown in 37 years with one of the horses out of the program. With American Pharaoh in 2015. It was on the front page center of New York Times, the article about it. And, if you turn to the center, you saw my 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 sports medicine, I thought I would just adapt the technologies, but that the data did not exist on elite racehorses and the equipment to gather the data didn't exist. Along the way, I had to invent the portable ultrasound machine for heart imaging that's now commercial and the first heart rate monitor that would be accurate on the galloping horse and 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 with stick figures and multiple photos. And so it's been a long ride creating a lot of different modalities, sports medicine. And I hooked up early with someone named Patrice Miller who was a trainer. And she'd been on with horses since she was 2 years old, bouncing on the back of a horse with her grandmother in a basket. And then she became a jock, 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 and kind of, we were eggheads until she got here. So I say, I look at the altimeter and she, 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 handicapper who's invented ways to, 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, uh, Michael Kipnis. He's also known as the Wizard. You can find him, his stuff, on the Daily Racing Form website. So the combination is powerful, and, uh, the people who actually would like to win and not pay a fortune, right? I, I liken it to it, the industry, to like if you wanted to go into yacht racing or 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 hull, which can be a bazillion bucks. But we can't promise the lottery ticket, oh, we've hit it more than once, but we can tell you that We play the game, we win, and a lot of our clients do make money or don't spend much to play the game. So that's what I do.

No, so it's so cool. You kind of said at the beginning, which I love the phrase you use, which is, you know, the Moneyball of horse racing. And so for those that haven't seen the movie or read the book and aren't familiar with that story, it was basically bucking against the, the trends of how you selected players before, which was usually looking at, you know, he, he, that, looking at physical size and speed and other things that ultimately didn't necessarily translate to, um, to winning games. And so what you're doing is kind of taking that approach of kind 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, how the, the current industry is set up to where it's really focused on pedigree, right? You're, oh, I'm the—

absolutely. Now the big price is on pedigree, or if they go to a 2-year-old auction where you can see them run, it's on who ran the fastest, where they run an eighth of a mile or a quarter of a mile. You know, big deal, you won the first half of the race with that horse. Yeah, it's— 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% of the million-dollar stallions, the million-dollar mares, 95% of what comes out is not a great racehorse. And if we had— 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. That's what we do. And they'd say, well, the pedigree— and the best pedigree horses is kind of self-fulfilling often because they get the best trainers and the best veterinarians and the best everything. But you know, it's not a good predictor. And, and even if it, you know, and they said— so often I'm bucking the pedigree thing and they say, can't do it without 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 3 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. Uh, 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 that way. So it's a good— but it's, you know, it's, it's really a closed industry and it's very traditional. And I'm still pretty unpopular. I mean, having won the Triple Crown, I've won the Kentucky Derby twice for clients and, and been second in— I had 5 entries out of 20. Your chances of getting into the Kentucky Derby, once in a lifetime, are infinitesimal. We had 5 of our clients got qualified one. In, in the starting gate at 20 horses. And people still don't— they think we have theories, or who are they, or, or they go to somebody who's a cheap imitation, doesn't have the data, doesn't have the technicians. You know, they have violin in the instruction book, but they can't play a symphony.

So what, what's, what's the appeal of pedigree, right? I mean, I, as someone, for like, for me, who is— I love horses. I mean, I think they're one of the coolest animals you know, 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, what was the other big movie? Seabiscuit. You know, now you see like, oh, this is the great-great-great-great-great-grandson of Secretariat or whatever. And that automatically creates that connection of, you know, offspring, or this is an offspring of a winning horse. Is, is that really what it is or is there some physical dynamics? Man, I remember Secretary got like a bigger heart or something, right?

Then, well, 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. You're, 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, great horses don't have the best everything, but they've got a good everything. There are no holes in them. So my job is looking for the holes. I don't get carried away with the best this or that. Secretariat, 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 on the farm in groups of 5 or 6. And some you had to strangle them to keep them from getting to the front when, where they weren't supposed to be yet and run it off. And some you had to, you know, keep working on to get them to keep up. And it wasn't the ability that was the difference. So the attitude makes a big difference and 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, you know, it doesn't hurt to run and if you don't get as Exhausted, you know, and there it's a big deal. Bigger lungs, bigger spleen, that blood dope some naturally. It's an incredible thing that they can do to them with 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% 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's going on until you gather the data on those elite athletes. And I've got 40 years of that. So, I know the differences. And yeah, the pedigree, everybody's still in love with pedigree. It's romantic. But yeah, it doesn't really work. I mean, it's not silly, but it's not very powerful. It's 95% of them. Very most expensive, the mark of the best, you know, million-dollar, multi-million-dollar stallions and multi-million-dollar mares, and 95% of them aren't very good racehorses. Why? You can't work on that basis. Also, think about it. What makes a horse a phenomenal champion? Why is it different than 99.9% of the rest of the horses? It's probably got some 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 kind of lucky and somehow you match it up with the other recessives? And, and there's different kinds of champions. There's, you know, the sprinters and 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, uh, you know, and now it's much more sophisticated, but they're still caught a few. They caught a horse that was disqualified from the Kentucky Derby, was it 1 or 2 years ago? And in other words, the major stallion and his trainer's in jail because he was, you know, and they're They're right there in the stud book doing their thing. You know, how legitimate is that? And they're— half of them are on Lasix, so they, they get this thing called epistasis, epitaxis, what they, they, they hemorrhage in their lungs and their trachea, and, and they choke and they can't go a distance because of that. You know, like 70 or 80% of the horses are on medication to deal with that. So some of them are, you know, covering up this problem and then passing it all on So yeah, pedigree's, it's romantic and it's totally believed in by the majority of the experts, but it's, it's, that's why I'm the industry disruptor. It's so powerful. I, my track record can't even overcome it. Yeah. And I'm doing, you know, like 10 times better than the other guy. But then everybody lies about the track record or they show you the one horse they had, the experts who were right once. And people, you can verify the track records. There's, But most people don't. Well, I mean, it's, it's game and running. It's an industry of rascals. There's a lot of bad actors.

Yeah, I didn't actually watch the Kentucky Derby this year, but what I heard from, from multiple people is that there were the, the top 3 horses weren't even the big names on the list, right? The, the ones that ended up—

nope, the heavy, heavy favorite was 15th. He just kind of stopped. Nobody knows, maybe he was lame or something. and a guy snuck through in the rail, so he ran probably, I don't know, you know, many yards less than anybody else had to because he got the rail trip and he, 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, he, he beat him by this much.

That's a $3, a $5 million purse.

He beat him by this much. And why? Because his jockey was smart and his trainer's a genius, Kenny McPeck. Peak, and they studied the pre— they got the rail, they got the one hole, so they knew they were going to be in the rail. They studied the last guy who pulled off 50-to-1 from the rail, a 50-to-1 upset with Minat Burrell. It was Calvin Burrell was the 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, you know. And if it, if it closes, you— there's a collision and you can die. But he, he took it and had the teeny hole and bang, he went right through and bingo. And Ducky Durbin, to the working-class horse with the, uh, with a smart guy training and jockey. Good for them. They beat the bazillion— the billionaire's horse. They paid $2.4 million. That was a baby because of the pedigree, right?

Yeah, I think that's the point of this too. It's like 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—

I advise my clients, I try to get them a pedigree. I try my best to get them something that does well and will 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 no pedigree, even if I think they're terrific. Because it kind of screws your client. Even if he wins, it's not worth it. I'm sorry to interrupt, but I do pay attention for the market purpose, you know, for the business part of it. I'm paying attention very sharply to pedigree, but not when I'm trying to find the athlete.

Yeah, I mean, from my perspective, you know, from the investing side of things, if you're going after pedigree, you're going to pay a premium, a pretty, you know, pretty penny to get one horse. And then, like you said, you're getting the hot— the best trainers, best—

between $40,000 and $2 million it can be. Difference is the pedigree, not the horse, right?

And hey, what do you think, that $2 million, spread it across, you know, 20 different horses and get, you know, pay the same amount, and, uh, you're increasing your odds substantially and potentially using, using better insight.

So, yeah, that's— 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 for some client. How much it cost, what it earned, what it was resold for. Again, I can document the story. It works.

Talk about some of the— what's some of the magic, some of the secret sauce, right? I mean, this is your proprietary tech.

The secret sauce, like I say, I could give you the violin and the instruction book, but it won't mean it'll play a symphony. But we buy horses that we know what they're supposed to look like, how they're shaped, the angles and the lengths of the different limb segments, and they— you know, 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 or, and whether it's safe or not. And that most of them, and the answer is no to both of those things. We know that their heart is bigger than, it's gonna be as much as 50% bigger volume at pumping and thick walls of their heart. We know their spleen in the horse, they wring their spleen when they leave the gate, when they get excited and they dump an extra 70% red blood cells into their bloodstream, and that's an enormous effect on endurance. That's what the Russians were doing in the early Olympic blood doping scandals. But the horse does it naturally from evolution. So when the wolves came and they had to go from nothing to bang, you know, from running, they could do that. And, and then we have trainers who, a lot of the lamenesses are very subtle. So we have heart rate meters on 'em, and you can tell if their heart rate is higher on a one, they're different leads, one right, left, left, right-handed, left-handed. If it's higher on one lead than the other at the trot, 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 to diagnose. We have— we use all the latest diagnostic tools up to and including PET scans. Now, we don't run a horse with a subtle lameness because if you do that, it hurts. And then they— they're creatures of habit. They learn if they try hard and it hurts, they ain't trying hard. And, uh, you know, and then there's the diet, you know, and everything else. It all— it's a lot of people, a lot. Even our blacksmiths, if they put the nail in wrong and the horse is sore, you know, you can't— and there's a lot— horses aren't all the same, their hooves 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 blacksmith, a good trainer, and it's raised on a farm with a breeder who knows what the hell they're doing, my farm, it's like 200 acres and it looks like pastoral. It just, you know, God's nature, but it's not, you know, we spend 40 years. So our pasture, our only grass has no nematodes, no tall fescues. It's all perennial ryegrass. There's all the things that can affect a horse's health, Lyme disease, nothing. It's all been carefully eliminated and all the ways they get hurt, IRF, you know, And, and we don't have anybody who doesn't know what they're doing. Some of 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, you know, is a, is a under-the-table pay, low minimum wage. You know, what are they doing? What— and you can hurt the horse in a heartbeat. There's so many, they're so fragile.

How much of it, from your standpoint, is nature versus nurture, right? How much of it is just biologically, physiologically, the horse's, um, system, structure, stride is predisposed to make them—

Yeah, it was 100% nature to begin with, but there's a thousand ways to screw it up, and people find them. So that, you know, it's a rare guy who knows what to do with that horse. It's rare. You know, some of the trainers, they're great horsemen and they're crappy managers, so they can't manage all the things that Why are they trying? They got 200, 300 horses. How can they possibly pay all the attention each one? They don't. So who does? You know, that's what you should be asking yourself. It's you. It's— and the, the ride— I, I— we've had horses that should have won the Kentucky Derby and the ride finished them off. I could describe to you what goes wrong. There's, there's this, you know, they, 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 and then start again. So you have to take the inertial momentum of a 1,000-pound animal and re— restart it. You know, it doesn't work, or they get banged. We had one horse, was a low odds in the Connecticut Derby, and he had the one on. She didn't win 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 ran well again. It's just so many things that can go wrong. So I don't know, it's nature-nurture. It's, you know, it's a waste of your time to have a good team work on a horse that isn't the elite horse, right? But the elite horse ain't enough. You need the team. Yeah, team.

So going to the just nature side of it, I mean, you do buy young horses, right? And you— absolutely, aspects of we think this has the good chances, it has at least the you know, the, the material that we can work with to, to have, have chances. So what are the things that you're looking for biologically at that kind of first point, um, to make a decision of, yeah, this, this—

Well, first of all, we've got DNA markers now that we've generated from our databases about the, 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 2-year-old in training sale I'm going to next week. They, horses will run by we will video them in high-definition slow motion. Then we take those videos and take them apart and look for how, whether they, 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 bone. They chip their knees, they chip their sesamoids, their ankles. So we, we are 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, is goes from his 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 happens to a lot of horses. And you gotta know you can see in advance whether it's a flaccid epiglottis or a whole larynx function or whether it's displacing or they call it displacing. And you have to weed those, you know, you know, you know, there are operations for that, but why buy a problem, you know? And so we've got the film, we've got the internal organ scans, we're looking down their throat, we're X-raying them. We do look at their pedigree just to see if the mare has produced any anything. If she's had like 9 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 try hard. And, uh, so that's the bad sign.

So how—

yeah, there's just a long checklist. We, we go through everything. They have to pass every single test or they're out. We are not gonna take a weak link in that chain. You know, that weak link is where it breaks. So how do you, how do you look at the qualitative measures?

You said, yeah, the thing the Secretariat had going for him is he just wanted to run, right? How do you, how do you find that?

It's very hard, but I'll tell you, give you some stories. We had one horse, we went to see the yearlings at a farm, and 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 running up to the gate, right? And then the Red Sea parts, and there's one that comes forward. And we said, goddamn, that's a dominant animal.

We want—

and she became a champ. There was another one named Club Fighter. We went out in the field to see the yearlings, and there was only one horse out there with a long tail. A yearling. Nobody, nobody was biting and pulling on his tail. We bought him. He was a fighter. And I bought one named Pinky Pizwinski. And I went to the stall. We'd done all this shit. And then I went to the stall before the auction to look at it. I just wanted to see, I want to stand as I'm standing in his presence and I'm kind of 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 going to beat him staring him down, man. You had to write him down. And he, uh, he came within like a, like a 10th of a second of the 20-year-old track record at Laurel that was set on the grass by a legend, Kelso, who was Horse of the Year like 6 times. That was Wildwood. And he had a lousy pedigree. Well, not lousy, but nothing, nothing special. But why? It was— if you're going to beat him, you had to run. And he was never flustered. He was in the paddock, everybody being crowds and blah blah blah. He didn't give a damn. He just didn't care. I love that horse.

So how do you, how do you make money as someone that invests in horse, uh, racehorses, right? Is obviously if you win a race, you're making some money for the, for the, the pride of winning.

No, it's a breeding step. The, the money mostly. Well, these days there's so many multi-million dollar races, that's not so true anymore. But, uh, breeding traditionally has been the way to make your money. It's better to buy, uh, females, the fillies, because A big stallion will cover maybe 200 mares, 250 mares a year. And, you know, and so you're gonna have 200, 250 times as many multi-million-dollar worthwhile mares that you can develop that have to get to the top stallions as you can the top stallions. So why not buy the mares? And, uh, so that's, you know, so that's one strategy. And we buy mares that people want. They can make their own pedigree if they win enough big races. That people want that as a pedigree. And the stallion, it's different. You have to have— nobody really believes it. Honestly, it's kind of a mid-classic pedigree. So it's easier to buy the fillies, and they can make their own pedigree, but we, we make sure that they have enough that nobody will think it was a freak. And, uh, 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, many millions of dollars. And that's, that's the big payday. 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, you know, have a lot of fun, but that, that's not business. Let's say you either have a team or you don't, you know, you got to buy enough horses so the odds can work for you, right?

I'm just saying make your own pedigree.

You mean the horses are winning, so now they have, uh, yeah, if you win a Grade 1 race, there's 100 Grade 1, what are called Grade 1 races like the Kentucky Derby or the World Championships. 100 Grade 1 races in the world a year, and if you win 1 or 2 of those with your mare, unless it's by Truck Outta West, it's— they're going to think that they're going to want that mare. Somebody's going to pay a lot of money because they're going to breed to it. Got it, got it. When I say— they say buy the stallion's name and then out of the mare. Buy Secretariat out of, I don't know, Madcap Escapade. So that's why the joke is by Truck Outta West for the horses with no pedigree.

Okay. Well, my last question. So in our, in our industry, you know, we have a colloquialism that it's, it's not the horse, it's 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 bones, a good location. But how you manage that property is the bigger the success driver, right? So, um, I don't know how much that, that, you know, holds true in horse racing.

I know, I know more than as much or more than anywhere else because there's so many baloney bullshit artists or guys who are just rascals. And without 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, regularly, or you're, you're really kind of— 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 Secretariat. I honestly think there's a lot of trainers who wouldn't do well with Secretariat. There's too many things they would have done wrong.

Yeah. So how do you attract a good jockey to a non-pedigreed horse, right? I mean He start—

well, 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 on him. They're real, they want to win. So the trainer will tell them, you know, when the horse in his workouts and in this and that and the other, and our track record. So when we go to somebody like Bob Baffert or one of the top trainers, Bill Mott, and we say, this is, you know, this is as good a horse as we've ever found and you're going to train it, and you know, there's no problem getting a good jockey. We get good jockeys, they want to ride them.

So if, if, if someone wants to go after this, it's like, hey, I like this, I want to put some money here, I want to go try this out. Obviously you have the upfront cost of buying the horses, but then what's kind of the ongoing costs with the trainers, with, um, just—

oh, we have— I can give them examples of what other people do, but cost anywhere from $4,000 to $5,000 a month for each racehorse's upkeep at the trainer. Okay, you're going to spend $40,000 to the sky's the limit to buy the horse, right? And, uh, you know, and if he's— if it's a decent horse, you'll probably be in at $15,000, $20,000 before you'll have a chance to earn anything back. But if he's a decent horse, within the first year he should break even and start earning money. And, uh, but you know, someone may get hurt, someone gets sick, and someone don't give a shit. So you need more than one horse. But, uh, we tell people you should buy anywhere from 5 to 10. And then you're, if you've got the right people, you're going to probably have a good ride, a good run, have some fun. Probably not a little bit, probably if you want to lose much money with it and you may make a lot, but it's a risk return, you know, it's a high risk, high return industry. Yeah. Yeah. I think those are the numbers. Cool. You know, we've had clients who put in $40 million. We had one who put in $40 million. 5 years later it was $64 million and he won all of them. And he had a hell of a ride, good time. He won everything there was to win. So he, I think he thought he was, had a good time, having worth his while. He kind of felt like it. And then you have some that don't listen to you. They use 3 or 4 different agents. One guy, we put him like a million dollars worth of horses and they earned back a million and a half, but he spent $3 million with other agents on other didn't do anything. So he lost money overall. So he thought, ah, this doesn't work. And then he dealt off. Give me a break. What do I have to do?

Jeff, well, this has been really fun. I appreciate you coming on and sharing some of your knowledge. What's the best way for folks to get ahold of you and inform them about what you do?

Well, the best way to get ahold of me is, I guess, our website or my cell phone. The website's just EQB, like eCoin Biometrics, but it's not.com, it's.fyi,.fyi. And, uh, my cell phone, I guess, is— well, give, give us LinkedIn or something.

You have an email, right?

I have an email. Just my name, Jay Seder, J-S-E-D-E-R, J-S-E-D as in dog, E-R, @eqb.fyi. And, you know, if you— if people want to put their toe in the cold water, we have people we trust to do partnerships, and we can direct them there. They can have a piece of one horse, learn something about the industry that way too, and have some fun. You don't have to, you know, you don't have to jump in right away. And, you know, 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, uh, it's better than a cubicle in the, uh, insurance building. I needed to be out. I wanted to work with horses. I wanted to be outside. So yeah, thank you, God.

That's awesome. Well, appreciate you coming on the show, and, uh, definitely love what you're doing. And, uh, it's fun to highlight some of the cool insights that you've discovered in the past few decades, and, uh, definitely sharing the love of horses. So appreciate you coming on.

I really appreciate this opportunity. Thank you very much. All right.

Thanks so much.

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