KEE April 2yo's close out sale season with uptick
 

Keeneland 2-year-old sale rebounds
By Glenye Cain Oakford

LEXINGTON, Ky. - Keeneland's April 2-year-old sale closed out the boutique juvenile auction season on a bright spot, reversing the 2009 sale's declines in gross and median. The sale-topper was a $625,000 Bernardini colt that Jess Jackson's Stonestreet Stable purchased from William Helmbrecht, agent. Helmbrecht's brother Mike bred the colt in the name of the Woodbridge Farm, which he operates with partner Bill Geist.

The single-session auction at Keeneland's sale pavilion in Lexington grossed $12,013,000 for 71 horses, a slight improvement of 2 percent from last year's total for 66 juveniles. The average fell by 5 percent, a much shallower decline than that seen last season, to $169,197. In the most positive sign, horses that sold brought a median price of $135,000, up 15 percent from 2009's figure. Buybacks were 37 percent.

SALES RESULTS

I thought that hip 117 would be the sale topper (a filly out of Spain by Johannasburg) but she only sold for 525. The first hit was 300 and it went to 4 then 5 then it was over. Not alot time taken to sell her. She was on the petite side. A couple of surprises to me were a couple of nice looking War Fronts that sold well and actually the Bluegrass Cat's looked good. Got shut out on a couple but that was expected as the ones that sold, sold pretty solid unless you were dropping 100K. Not a very large crowd but I did like the evening sale.

Saw a lot of the regulars there (Pletcher, Assman, Baffert, Romans, etc.) but they didn't seem to be bidding. I really liked hip #49, RNA'd at 140k.

The one takeaway I had from this sale is there are still a lot of delusional breeders that believe their horses are worth more than they really are, based on the number of RNA's (41 vs. 71 actually sold) and the prices they RNA'd for (quite frankly, an Aragorn with a moderate work shouldn't RNA for $60k.)

Same people who are continually delusional about what their homes are worth.

I didn't know that Bernstein was a big deal and I thought Storm Cat was done already.