MAGNUS … ON THE MONEY!

First Season Sire heads chart by ‘strike rate’ and AEI

Group One winning sprinter, MAGNUS, may have only had a handful of runners in Australia to date, but he’s certainly making his presence felt in the Australian First Season Sires’ premiership … on two counts.

Firstly, the Eliza Park based stallion boasts an incredible strike rate in terms of stakes success: of his six runners in Australia thus far, three of them – Imprimis, Magnus Reign and How Swede It Is – have all earned black type. That’s 50% stakes horses to runners.

And it’s not just a shot in the dark either: Imprimis, who ran second at Caulfield on Saturday, now has two stakes placings from two campaigns to date, while How Swede It Is has only once finished out of a place in five outings.

But perhaps even more importantly is Magnus’ standing on the Freshman chart in terms of the Average Earnings Index (AEI).

Magnus’ is sitting very pretty with an AEI calculation of 1.76, which places him at the head of the pack.

Many astute breeders – and indeed buyers – place enormous faith in the AEI due to allowing investors to “value a stallion at a quick glance”.

A hugely popular tool in the northern hemisphere, US Bloodhorse points out that the AEI is “one of the most popular and oft-quoted statistics in thoroughbred horse breeding” and is defined as measuring the “earning power of a sire’s progeny by comparing the average earnings of his runners with all the other runners of the same age that raced in the same country during a given year”.

The AEI also considers stallions “from one generation to the next without resorting to a side-by-side look at earnings in dollars, which naturally don't maintain equal value over time” and making it “possible to compare sons of stallions who lived generations apart”.

Importantly, Bloodhorse pointed to AEI’s usefulness for First Season Sires as, stating that if one sire has 60 juveniles and another only has five, it would be “misleading to compare their progeny earnings in pure dollars”.