The yearling sales season, which set records from summer to fall, makes one final stop for the year with the four-day Fasig-Tipton October Yearlings Sale which gets underway Monday at 11 a.m. in Lexington. The remaining three session begin at 10 a.m. The October sale, which expanded to four days a decade ago, has made itself a must-attend event with an increasingly impressive list of graduates and the 2024 auction set highwater marks for gross and average while producing its lowest buy-back rate in 11 years.
Consignors expect to see another broad bench of buyers when bidding returns to Newtown Paddocks Monday morning.
“Tons of good horses have come out of here,” said Zach Madden, whose Buckland Sales will present 30 yearlings at the four-day auction. “People circle it. As the sale has gotten bigger in size, I think it's broadened the buying base a bit, which is obviously a good thing. You get more eyes on horses.”
Those 'eyes' will come from near and far, according to Matt Lyons of Candy Meadows Sales.
“The pinhookers are always active and I think they have had a pretty good year, so they will be back,” Lyons said. “I would expect some international activity. The Koreans should be there and I would expect some of the Saudi buyers to be there. And the European pinhookers have been coming to the October sale of late, too. So I would expect it to be a pretty broad bench of buyers again.”
While demand has seemed almost insatiable at some points this summer and fall, Madden still expects to see some familiar polarization at the October sale.
“I think it's going to be more of the same,” Madden said of expectations for the October market. “The ones they want, they are going to bowl you over for. We are going to have a healthy number of horses–I think we have 30 over there–I just expect more of the same. They are going to go crazy for 10 or 12 of them and the others we are going to try and move along as best we can.”
Despite the demand, there are still those proverbial hoops to jump through.
“You still have to bring it; you still have to vet, and walk right, and mind your manners, from a horse sense,” Madden said. “You still have to do all the things very well. And then you will get rewarded for it. But a lot of people act like you just run anything up there nowadays and get paid. That's not the case. These buyers and judges of these horses are very good at what they do. A lot of them have a lot of money to throw around and they don't want to buy anything that has a flaw.”
Lyons had a similar assessment.
“Keeneland was a great sale, if you had the right horse,” Lyons said. “But if you had the wrong sire or a little ding on the X-rays, it was the same as ever before. For the right ones, they probably brought a couple of ticks above what they were bringing in other years.”
Still the competitive marketplace has had a positive effect on the middle market as buyers who were shut out have had to branch out to other sales, according to Madden.
“The middle market has been a tad bit healthier than it has been, but I think it's just kind of a trickle down from the top,” he said. “The bottom the market is just the same. It's a wedding or a funeral type thing with the majority of them. But I have friends and clients and agents who had to hit up Timonium and go to Ocala, too, just because they still needed horses.”
Candy Meadows Sales will offer 10 yearlings at the October sale and all will be making their first appearance in a sales ring this year. For Lyons, the later sales date, as well as the more relaxed format, are a perfect match for some horses.
“When you get late into September when you are ship, show and sell, you are showing one day and if you don't get it right or if you've got one short-lister looking for 10 people from Ocala and the horse goes out there and doesn't do right and you don't make that list, you can miss a lot of people,” Lyons said. “Whereas, I think the advantage of October is that you are there for a few days and there is enough time for people to see the horses. If I felt like I had a nice horse who was going to go too late in September and might not benefit from showing one day and selling the next day, I might pull the horse back for October.”
Lyons continued, “And there are some horses who just mature so well on their own this time of year that they are not as hard to prep as when you are trying to get ready for an earlier sale. They are almost developing on their own and they don't need as much heavy prep as we might do to push one to get into September.”
With an open format and 1,601 catalogued yearlings, shoppers will have to cover a lot of ground heading into sale time.
“There are enough people who have bought good horses out of the October sale–if you look at the front page of the catalogue every year and you see how many good horses have come out of the sale–there are enough statistics to show that there are a lot of good horses in that sale every year,” Lyons said. “I think a lot of the buyers will have to be there and with the way the catalogue is formatted, the best horse could be hip one or it could be on the last day of the sale. So you really have to work it.”
Four yearlings brought $500,000 or more during the 2024 October sale, led by a $550,000 colt by Curlin. In all, 1,125 yearlings sold last year for a gross of $58,940,500. The average was $52,392 and the median was $20,000. The buy-back rate was 17.0%.
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