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Comment by defrost | Hacker News Reader

> what if there's an even better horse out there

Doesn't matter, such things threaten the horse investor lock in economics.

Many years past, an early bit of software from my student days was a side project making an easy to use database system for a horse stud farm, high status stallions being put to mares with the feed, vet visits, results, etc. all logged.

Horse racing is pretty much all about pedigree - without the lineage horses are considered valueless by the industry - super fast back country waler crosses might be acceptable for a four mile charge across open ground onto machine gun nests .. but w/out that pedigree <shrug> no Lord or up and coming billionaire is going to syndicate that horse for racing.

I imagine Polo to be much the same, in the rich set. Probably more open and accepting out on the steppes knocking about the heads of the vanquished.

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It makes sense to me if the buyer is concerned that the performance would revert towards the mean on second generation if you attempt to breed further. But... The new paradigm is not breeding, it's cloning. So it seems like "one shot" high performance steeds even without pedigree could be viable?

I feel like I am missing a lot.

Can you imagine the insanity when they try to do "LLM style" sequencing?

Pedigree is often a scam.

I know a peer of the realm who made pretty much his entire fortune on forged horses - he was breeding to make fast horses, but the pedigree was a load of, well, horseshit. All started because he’d bought a stallion who shot blanks.

Now it’s all about eight generations deep so he’s safe at this point, as they’re their own pedigree now.

Oh, and don’t even get me started on cows. There's a whole black market genomics industry going on in the uk right now, and probably elsewhere, too.

I can only agree. Hard.

It's less about the horse, the speed, the actual genetics - it's all about the process, the appearance, the gate-keeping.

Country Clubs for horses (and cows, etc)

At some point moving up the luxury scale the price is less about product and more about buyer psychology.

I can sell a ripped t-shirt, but that same product coming from an upscale exclusive boutique owned by so-and-so’s wife is participation in a whole ecosystem with lots of signalling to other buyers in the same financial strata.

Yep. Some of my pants have rips and visibly bad stitching because I ripped them and am bad at stitching. Then I see people at the same parties buying brand new ripped pants. At least I fit in, I guess.

> I can sell a ripped t-shirt, but that same product coming from an upscale exclusive boutique owned by so-and-so’s wife is participation in a whole ecosystem with lots of signalling to other buyers in the same financial strata

This is only true for the lower financial strata though. It’s only the poorer people for whom shopping in so-and-so’s wife’s boutique is a meaningful experience.

Memories of the Glock family and their horses ;)

Turns out they made a little more than just a few piddly guns...

> but w/out that pedigree <shrug> no Lord or up and coming billionaire is going to syndicate

sounds like an opportunity. as horse racing has a monetary reward associated with success one imagines a moneyball sort of play that you can compound by betting on your horse which the oddsmakers are going to handicap because it "doesn't have the pedigree" (at least the first few go arounds)

There is a wee bit of money to be made winning a race, sure.

Here's a question though (can vary by country and racing industry), how do the winnings from racing (as a distribution) compare to the earnings from pedigree breeding, stud fees, sperm straw sales, etc.?

I agree there's room for disruption, just as there is from (say) the iron grip of the US Home Owners Associations and other cartels, but expect a lot of regulatory push back from the insiders.

The, ah, American Quarter Horse Association won't let any old nag run if they can help it.

If someone came in and moneyballed the sport with no name horses, wouldn’t their stud fee rise with wins? New lineage would start.

You'd expect so and it's bound to have been done, it's still one of those domains where the establishment (owners, trainers, breeders, jockeys, track associations, etc) is weighted against outsiders.

Money would count, but I dare say it'd need a bit of crafty social engineering running in parallel to crack in.

Caveat: I'm not a horse racing / polo insider - I did some contract work years back and rubbed shoulders with a bunch of millionaire horsey types.

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