Are Steward Auctions Worth It?

Original article written by Kim Plausible posted 9 years 1 week ago

Another question from a sim reader.

“Are Steward breds even worth the money as a business investment or are they a vanity purchase for the fun of it, even if you never make money back?”

Buying any horse is a gamble. It’s literally your job as a buyer to figure out which of those gambles are more likely to pay off.

If you buy a lottery ticket that costs 10 million dollars and the best payout you can hope to achieve is $2 million, that is a really bad investment. But what if you could win $2 million plus ten other lottery tickets worth a possible $2 million apiece? In that case you have the potential to make $22 million.

Or, you could buy a lottery ticket that costs 10 million dollars, and it has the opportunity to make you back $2 million, and an additional $1-5 million a year for the next 10 years. You could make $12 to $52 million off that purchase, which is a pretty sweet deal.

And neither of those deals are exaggerations for the possibilities you have. Harry Potter stood for $100k for most of his stud career. He’s had 458 foals. Assuming that some of those are homebreds and the owner saved $100k by using her own stallion, he’s made or saved roughly $45 million for owner Alysse Peverell, plus the more than $8 million he made on the track. She has profited $28 million off of him and he’s not done yet.

Clearly Best sold for roughly $12 million. She made ~$2 million, her progeny has made ~$19 million, Susie is standing four of her sons including Rambling and Vortex who get $75k plus a pop for their foals, and she is also the dam of Amber, who made ~$4.7 mil and whose progeny have made ~$7 million, so far. The wealth this one Steward-bred has amassed and will continue to amass for Susie Rydell is incalculable.

It’s not just the super expensive horses that turn a profit. Pillar of Sand cost me $428k. She made $1.7 million and won a Steward’s Cup trophy for me - plus all the deals I made for foal swaps, leases, whatever. In fact, I have never bought a Steward-bred I didn’t profit from in some way, so if you’re asking ‘is it possible at all to profit from a Steward-bred’ then, yes, absolutely. If you’re asking, ‘is it likely at all to profit from a Steward-bred’ then, honestly, that kind of depends on how good you are at picking out a good gamble.

You could argue that this is the exception and not the rule, but I actually feel that Steward-breds increase your chances of gambling well rather than decrease them. Take the Steward-bred title out of the equation. Someone is selling a nicely bred horse with no workouts or gallops. It’s on the sales page for a few million. Why are they selling it?

Either they need the money fast, they are tired of the bloodline, or they think they can make more in a sale than they can owning it. You don’t want to pay more for that horse than you can make off of owning it, so the last one is a real concern. With the Steward, you don’t have that concern, because she’s not your competitor and selling the horse is the only way she will make money.

People who own really nice horses also don’t have to rely on the sales page at all for the second concern. If they are tired of the bloodline, they can do a trade or a foal swap with other people in the sim. So they probably won’t go to the sales page anyway.

And the only people who need money fast are up and comers who overstretched themselves. The top players owning the top bloodlines aren’t likely going to put their horses up on the sales page for quick cash because they can wait half a second and make a million.

So when it comes to the top bloodlines in the game, the Steward auctions aren’t just ‘worth it’ - they are priceless. I’d like to know where you plan on getting those kinds of pedigrees if not the Steward auction. These auctions kind of make sure that the top players can’t just sit on their money-makers for the rest of the sim’s existence while the rest of us stare on in wistful wishing. The Steward trades a whole bunch of money to owners of top mares specifically so she can assure someone in the sim besides them will get to own, race, and profit from that mare’s babies. She’s basically distributing the chances for stable upgrades that otherwise would just stay in that one owner’s stable forever.

And, honestly - where do you think you have better odds of your gamble paying off than in an auction full of great families and nice crosses that were hand picked and hand bred by someone who knows the game inside and out?

I get why this question comes up. You look at a horse and you think, this is a fair amount to pay. I can probably make that back and if s/he’s not a major producer then I don’t lose anything. Then another guy comes along, triples what you think is fair, and just crosses his fingers in the hopes that it works out. And you’re like, no possible way! No way he can make that back. He’s just spending money for the heck of it.

That’s a possibility, because what else are you going to do with it? But it’s also possible he’s just playing the lottery, and you can’t win if you don’t buy a ticket. Maybe he won’t make that money back. Maybe he could have bought fifty allowance-type horses instead that will consistently but slowly earn money every week. Or maybe he is simply willing to gamble more than you in the hopes that this horse will be his Clearly Best.

If you’re playing conservatively, you might not want to drop the kind of money that people are spending in Steward auctions. But if you are playing conservatively, you should also know that waiting for surefire payoffs takes a lot longer, your nest egg will build very slowly, and when someone else wins the lottery, it wasn’t just luck. They risked more, they earned more, and they knew how to make it work.

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