And Duly Won

The colt Vancouver did indeed win the Golden Slipper today, giving Gai Waterhouse her sixth Golden Slipper victory, equaling the record of her father Tommy Smith, who is regarded as Australia's greatest ever race horse trainer. One has to bear in mind the lamp-lighting role that trainers from earlier eras had, and so it is difficult to compare with mathematical certainty today's trainers to those of the past - but in my own view, the daughter has surpassed her illustrious father already, and history will place her on as high a pedestal.

Gai Watyerhouse,
Australia's greatest race horse trainer

Vancouver not only won but paid a fairly decent price for such a good thing - 2/1 in many books. Basically you got double your money for the win plus your own stake back.

The Rosehill (Sydney) Golden Slipper is the richest two-year old 1200 meter race in the world, being a 3.5 million dollar race.

These things are nerve-wracking affairs because of the value to the owners and breeders of the win, and it certainly sounded from the immediate after-race interview of the jockey Tommy Berry, that it was a very emotional victory for him for multiple reasons.

For a dyed-in-the-wool gambler like myself, post-race activities are just as much part of the whole deal as the race itself and all of its nail-biting angst. 

At Sydney's 'Prime' Restaurant

The sun goes down, the crowd goes home, the gambler sizes up the day, finds the best place to eat and drink - and to think about life - and waits for the river of time to slowly wend its way back around to the same starting place all over again...

The problem that the entire world of investing makes all of the time, is that winning is a lonely profession... Not only does the shoe not fit everyone, there is no university course that guarantees you will be a millionaire in thirty minutes just by drinking coffees. And there is a massive difference between those who are in the papers today as 'billionaires' and you never hear of them again when times change. The Riverboat Gambler is always stalking the wooden boards at twilight. What does he know, that the others don't?

Golden Slippers!

I've been thinking of inviting a few people I know to emerge from out of the shadows and post a few things here - I'm not sure they will be prepared to, however. We shall see.

Meanwhile, I am having to resort to 'food porn' or 'doomer porn' - I shall have to attribute that to whomever on the Bear Chat Forum used that phrase as soon as I go back and check... (It was 'SpongeRob').

Yellen's Fed has continued what the idiot Bernanke started, and the Euro-Zone gangsters are clinging onto, and this has none too subtly destroyed the meaning of money and risk. On the one hand we are meant to believe interest rates have never been lower, on the other, billionaire Australian mining magnate Andrew 'Twiggy' Forrest couldn't get his corporate bond issue set at anything like decent odds in the market last week and has called the whole thing off - which simply tells me what I already know, 'benchmark' and 'risk free' rates are fictional right now.

And so, here I am, in the position of considering tomorrow's Golden Slipper horse race as the nearest thing to a real money market that I can see anywhere right now. 

Seldom will I 'declare' a particular horse 'the winner' before a race, but on this occasion I find it is possible for me to seriously consider putting my own money on this:

'Vancouver'

If you look closely, you will see that these kinds of Australasian thoroughbreds run with a straighter at the knee action than their counterparts in England and the rest of Europe for the most part. And this is because the grass is flatter here, better cut, and tends not to have the thick, muddy under-surface which characterizes so much of European flat courses. the consequence being that European horses are (possibly) given medications to ease knee problems they get by lifting and banging their legs down on the track surface after trying to extricate their hoofs from the mud.

With the possible exception of the best Japanese stables, Australasian and New Zealand horses are the best shorter distance to derby distance racers in the world, and they are a remarkably good investment from the breeding perspective given the comparative genetic talent available in this location. They almost always 'translate' to other regions, whereas the foreign horses do not always by any means.

I know that either before, or even during, but most certainly after, this year's Golden Slipper, I shall be indulging in food and/or drink porn so here is a suggestion along those lines:

A Golden Slipper from the Purple Bar,
at Sanderson's Hotel in London.

Hope For The World

Were they thinking about Howard Hughes when the creators of largely Sixties mass cultural diversions like Bond and Flint or even The Thunderbirds, for that matter, set 'home base' on some secluded and distant island?

There is a staggering lack of invention and fizz in the lifestyles of the 'said-to-be' stonkingly wealthy contemporary identities of the known world. Hughes was notoriously eccentric, and like Putin, disappeared although for longer than just eleven days at a time...

For the nostalgic - like myself - we may be able to find solace in re-imaginings, as they call them:

And, in the rare instance, recent creations drawn from the legacy of human envisioning:

Where's Vlad?

Who cares? Not me.

There's been a political assassination in a country that is being pressured with 'sanctions' (whatever the hell that is supposed to mean), every Western media outlet is claiming to know that Putin and/or his government is in some way behind the murder, and suddenly the same Western media is pissed off he isn't more around so that they can continue to place the 'searing lights' of Western media wisdom onto him.

Me, I care that Kylie Minogue is in Moscow.

Kyles is looking better and better the older she gets.

Thank god no one reads this blog. It wouldn't do to have old John Brennan worry too hard about where all this stuff is coming from, especially since it isn't the CIA that is getting pissed all over right now.

I understand they do a lot of cycling in Switzerland.

Perhaps our Kyles is heading in that direction next. Who's to say?

Betting 'Over Round'

Unlike Wall Street, horse racing concentrates extremely wealthy people in a crucible atmosphere, alongside everyone else.

And this is not to say they do not or cannot have an exaggerated effect on the running of any race - because the sheer overbalance of their money power effects all aspects of any given event.

Sheikh Mohammed

A young race horse, Brazen Beau, was purchased by Sheikh Mohammed of Darley Thoroughbreds just prior to last Saturday's 1 million dollar Australian Newmarket Handicap. Darley Stud paid 10 million dollars for the three year old colt and he will go to stud at the end of next year.

This crucible atmosphere of a horse race, is a mini money market with a highly compressed time frame.

In normal circumstances, bookmakers give odds on all the horses in a race in such a way as to ensure they must end up winning a percentage - 5%, 8%, or 10%, something like that - no matter which horse wins. The terminology for this is 'betting over round.'

And, the more betting interest in a race - the more genuine chances there are - the better odds can be quoted in order to attract a higher volume of money and therefore enabling the bookmaker to achieve a better final result for himself or herself (my sister was a licensed boomaker!)

Saturday's Newmarket on paper held many chances and theoretically, the odds quoted for every horse should have been larger than they actually were on the day. And this is because the winner, Brazen Beau, had a massive weight of well-informed money on it, even to the extent of having probably the current world's best rider, Joao Moreira, flown in from Hong Kong to Australia just for the ride. 

Joao Moreira on Brazen Beau

This kind of heavy-duty money means the bookmakers cannot afford to indicate to the general market that it is basically a one-horse race by 'blowing out' the prices of all the other horses, and thereby underscoring which specific horse held the enormous 'insider' money - because, the whole world of gamblers would simply follow the favourite leaving the bookmakers with a huge bill!

In consequence, the betting becomes 'cramped' leaving no room for anyone to bet, really. Except of course for the big money people on the inside, against whom even the best bookmaker must end up under pressure.

Being the younger horse in the field, Brazen Beau held a weight carrying advantage but that alone need not have been reason to think the horse was guaranteed to win. On the other hand, being an 'entire' means that there are questions over whether the other horses that were not heading for a stud career could not have been bought off for guaranteed cash up front - and I'm not saying this happened or that it does happen, but I think the completely swaying factor is in the stable having the wherewithal to fly in the world's best rider (given that Damien Oliver did not have a threat in the race; Oliver is arguably equal-best in the world).

10 million dollars before the race buys many things the other stables cannot afford.

All in all, Brazen Beau was a certainty on the day.

The race prize was 1 million dollars. The horse was bought for 10 million that week. It's career at stud will be worth perhaps a hundred million.

A share in the horse when it first went into racing as a two year old could have been had for as little as two thousand dollars.

This is a great winning story. It has its nuances and complexities, but horse racing exists as a genuine business for the breeding industry. At that side of things it is in no way a 'gamble.'

Brazen Beau is a great horse, whether the race it just won was entirely 'fair' or slightly conducted in its favour. 

Big money exaggerates things at their natural extremes - but it does not belie them as such.

I personally do not believe that either money markets in currencies, nor equities markets are exaggerated towards natural extremes right now. And you can draw your own conclusion as to what that implies.

But I am suggesting there is no real big money around in these markets and that their 'controlled performance' is a sign of bureaucratic and administrative and official manipulation, rather than the clear advantage that genuine big money buys itself to get a result on the display board.

And that is a problem for said markets.

Right now, Wall Street is not betting 'over round.' It is not betting 'under the odds' either. It is just not betting at all, and yet still putting up numbers that people are being expected to believe are really reflective of investors' buying and selling actually going on. But I doubt that it is going on.

People who have seen a lot...! : )

I don't think there is a way back from QE. The market moves when the market is infused from one source only. And this has 'cramped' the odds for everyone and everything else.

Now I am going to tell you something about what happened when this kind of thing happened on race horse tracks at least once before that I can remember personally.

An important jockey fell off a horse and nearly died, the biggest owner and gambler did die, a famous horse that had just won a huge race died the next day - in short, a lot of funny things happened. And the whole industry went into a decline for many long years. No one foresaw it. No one much expected it, and you wouldn't have necessarily predicted it going on the surface of things - which looked good on the outside.