With Help from Major Industry Players, Whiz Kids to Launch Unique Partnership

[Wandering Eyes]

Jack Bolton and Nico Case, friends since they were teenagers attending the same prep school, are young and they are smart. Bolton is a senior at USC and Case just graduated from MIT. For many such college graduates that might mean entering the work world with an eye on becoming a CEO or a lawyer or perhaps starting a hedge fund or doing something else on Wall Street. Not Bolton and Case. They have decided to get involved in the horse racing business.

The two are partners in Triple Crown Trading, a recently launched racing syndicate that will, like Myracehorse.com, offer micro shares in horses at affordable prices. But there's more. Investors in Triple Crown trading will be able to buy and sell their shares on a secondary market. If someone paid $300 for a share in an Into Mischief colt and that colt breaks his maiden by a dozen lengths, the partners can try to cash in and sell his or her share on Triple Crown Trading's secondary market at a profit. If that same horse loses by 10 lengths, then the investor might have seen enough and dump their shares at a loss.

In their partners, they have an impressive line-up working with them. The normal course of action will be to buy into horses purchased at the sales by some combination of Lane's End, Woodford Racing and Belladonna Racing. Triple Crown Racing's first offering is now available on its website. The colt's name is Savion (Tapit), who is an unraced soon-to-be 3-year-old. He was purchased for $450,000 at Keeneland September by Belladonna Racing. Triple Crown Trading owns 20% of the horse.

For this offering, the required minimum investment is $2,500, with shares selling for $500 each. Still dealing with issues that all such start-ups have to deal with, Triple Crown Trading intends to lower the minimum costs with additional horses it buys into. Bolton said the buy-in price for subsequent offerings should be around $100.

Savion will be trained by Cherie DeVaux.

If all of this sounds a lot like Myracehorse, that's because it is. They developed the concept of selling microshares and have been very successful. Their recent purchases include GI Preakness Stakes winner Seize the Grey (Arrogate) and GI Breeders' Cup Sprint winner Straight No Chaser (Speightster).

“Horse racing is generally only accessible to people with massive amounts of wealth,” Bowden said. “The fact of the matter is that the average American or the average horse racing fan can't afford to get involved. We want these people to get affiliated with the industry in the same way that people with far more money than them do. We think creating a marketplace for shares that are reasonably priced that the average individual can get in on without emptying their pockets is the way to go. That's something that should make the sport more fun for everyone involved.”

Bolton said that the costs involved with owning a horse with Triple Crown Trading versus owning a Myracehorse horse will be about 20% less.

“[Myracehorse] has this lane all to themselves,” said Lane's End's Bill Farish. “There shouldn't be a monopoly when it comes to the smaller investors. Jack' s intention is to improve on their model.”

“Myracehorse has seen very impressive growth and is doing very well as a company,” Bolton said. “We saw what they were doing and saw some opportunities to improve on that. What sets us apart will be the secondary market.”

Bolton and Case are still trying to iron out some issues with the SEC, and, for that reason, there will not be a secondary market for shares in Savion, who is expected to make his debut in February or March. But they expect those matters to be cleaned up quickly and that it won't be long before the secondary market is up and running.

“After this offering, we plan to raise a little bit of money and go out and create a platform that will allow people to buy and sell their shares,” Bolton said. “Our long-term vision is liquidity. Rather than bet on a race, you can invest in a share and then sell it afterwards or hold for a longer period and customize your portfolio. Nico kind of developed the second part of that ideal. We asked ourselves how are we going to make this better and that's when we saw this as the solution.”

On the home page of their website reads the slogan, “Don't Bet. Own.”

“If you are a person gambling, your incentives aren't really being cared for very well,” Bowden said. “That's where we saw an opening to say to people that if you are gambler, why don't you become an investor? The people who own the horses are incentivized to make you happy and to make the horses win because at the end of the day they have a stake in the same thing you did. When those incentives align, that's where we thought we found a better business model and a way for people to get involved. We wanted to create something that would really stick out from any other opportunities people have to become financially involved in the horse racing industry.”

Bolton and Bowden realize this won't work with just one horse or even 10. The secondary market won't work without an adequate amount of liquidity, which means many horses and many owners. Though they're still in one-step-at-a-time mode, the goal is to have a large stable and hundreds of investors.

They will be working closely with bloodstock advisor David Ingordo, whose clients include Belladonna. He says that Triple Crown Trading is an ideal way to get new people interested in the sport.

“Anything that brings new people into the business is a good thing,” Ingordo said. “Jack Bolton is young and they're attempting to build a foundation of younger horse owners. You never know where the next Mike Repole, Sol Kumin, Jerry Moss, pick your favorite big owner, is going to come from. To me, this looks like ownership development. If someone can get involved for a minimal amount of money they will have an incentive to go from there. That's something our sport should endorse in general because where are we going to get this next generation of owners?”

The post With Help from Major Industry Players, Whiz Kids to Launch Unique Partnership appeared first on TDN | Thoroughbred Daily News | Horse Racing News, Results and Video | Thoroughbred Breeding and Auctions.

View the full article