Patriot games in the syndication business

Cover image courtesy of Patriot Bloodstock

The syndicate market is a competitive space in Australian racing, and finding room among it for a new business isn’t an easy thing. Two years ago, that’s what Anthony Manton and Mitchell Lloyd did when they set up Patriot Bloodstock, and the subsequent journey is starting to push their names into racing’s everyday dialogue.

The two friends operate their business from Sydney, and their model mostly revolves around buying good-quality tried horses from the online digital platforms. They look for ability based on form principles, which include things like pace, track conditions and bias, sectionals and final margins.

Between them, Manton and Lloyd spend much of their time analysing race replays and trawling the online market. Inglis Digital has been very good to them, so too a few other avenues.

Currently, Patriot Bloodstock has 22 horses in work, mostly with trainer Mitchell Beer at Albury, and a few with James Ponsonby at The Oaks, near Camden, Cameron Crockett in Scone and Brett Robb at Dubbo.

The group has the 4-year-old mare Well In Sight (Shalaa {Ire}), whom they bought unraced and online for $20,000. She won her first three starts and was unplaced in the million-dollar Inglis Sprint at Flemington last March.

One of the latest success stories is Morgenstern (More Than Ready {USA}), a 5-year-old gelding purchased online for just $4000. He’s won his last three races on the bounce (and four of his last five), paying back his pricetag tenfold.

These two horses are what Patriot Bloodstock is all about, buying online at bargain-basement prices and getting a return in country racing. It’s a model that is working well for the two friends, and one that is resonating with those looking for an ownership experience minus the bottomless expenses.

“We’ve got regular mum-and-dad owners who can only afford their five per cent in one horse, and we’ve got some much bigger clients too,” Manton said. “We’ve got a guy who holds shares in six horses at five to 10 per cent each, and another where it’s nothing for him to spend $100,000 on 10 per cent of a million-dollar yearling, but he’ll also race a horse with us where it costs him $600 to get involved.”

Gallery: Some of Patriot Bloodstock's highlight horses, images courtesy of Patriot Bloodstock

In other words, the spread of support that Patriot Bloodstock has received is wide, and it’s allowed the business model to grow upwards in a short 18 months.

The boys in the bush

Lloyd is a small business owner in western Sydney, raised on road trips to country race meetings, while Manton is well-known through his work with Sky Racing as a broadcaster and race caller.

Their first foray into joint ownership was as friends, but the ship was so well-run that they settled on running it as a business and welcoming others in. That was a couple of years ago in 2020, but the ducks weren’t in a row for Patriot Bloodstock until early 2021.

“The syndicate market was pretty competitive when we started,” Lloyd said. “We were watching horses on Inglis Digital bringing $5000, and now they’re bringing $15,000.”

The escalation of the online marketplace has been unprecedented in Australia in the last handful of years, but Patriot Bloodstock is seeing its way around that.

“The competition in that tried-horse space is huge now,” Manton said. “Early on, we bought a horse for $4000 and turned up at Gundagai in a Class 1 and ran third. The horse that beat us that day was purchased on the same Inglis Digital sale for $120,000.

“So we paid $4000 for ours and ultimately ended up running in the same race. It was an early indicator for us which way we wanted this whole thing to go.”

For Patriot Bloodstock, spending up at the sales doesn’t always return the dollars.

“More often than not, those $100,000 horses selling online end up running around in the country,” Manton said. “From our point of view, we can get clients involved for $1000 for five per cent, or you can go elsewhere and spend $5000 for your five per cent and run in the same races.”

The 5-year-old gelding Morgenstern backed up this logic at Warren four days ago. He won a BM84 for trainer Brett Robb and is now four from five.

These sorts of results don’t always occur, but they’ve occurred enough for Manton and Lloyd to make a business out of it.

“You don’t have to spend $100,000 on a tried horse,” Manton said. “You can spend less. You’re not going to get a champion, and you’re probably not going to get a horse that changes your life, but you can have just as much fun and it can be much more affordable.”

Right now, this is the business acumen for Patriot Bloodstock, but Lloyd and Manton will open the doors eventually to better-graded horses and city-class or stakes-class ambitions.

“We’ve got a lot of boxes to tick in the country landscape first,” Lloyd said. “We’ve been well-represented already in the Highways, and there are country Cups, country championships and The Kosciuszko to tick off first. Once they’re ticked, we might not necessarily look to buy more expensive horses, but we’ll certainly be aiming to upgrade our stock a little bit and break into the metropolitan market.”

Everything starts somewhere, and while Patriot Bloodstock might have eyes on the metro scene eventually, its roots will always be country.

“We’re very passionate about country racing and there’s still a long way to go for us in that sphere,” Manton added.

Hunting for value

On conservative estimate, up to 90 per cent of Patriot Bloodstock’s tried-horse buying has been through Inglis Digital. As fruitful as that’s been, it’s also becoming a highly competitive outlet.

Manton and Lloyd have bought 17 horses on Inglis Digital since February last year, the most expensive of which was Alloway, a Wandjina gelding, for $35,000, and the cheapest of which was Turtleneck, a Winning Rupert mare that cost $7500.

The sirelines represent all comers, from Holy Roman Emperor (Ire) to Zoustar. Manton and Lloyd pay little attention to that line of the pedigree because, racing geldings, the bloodline isn’t of much consequence. However, they will take notice of a damline if they recognise it.

“If it’s a family we know on the damside, be it in the country or a family we grew up watching, we’ll go back to that well if we can,” Manton said.

So who are some of the horses that Patriot Bloodstock has bought?

The Redoute’s Choice gelding Still In Fashion cost them $22,500 on Inglis Digital in June, sold by Arrowfield Stud as a winner that was metro-placed. The 5-year-old won a race for Beer at Wagga three weeks ago, and he was fourth in a Class 1 at Canberra before that.

The group’s most recent purchase, Mr Metrics (City Place {USA}), was from Adelaide last weekend via a Take 2 Bloodstock auction, and by Monday morning they were syndicating the horse and he was fully reserved. He’s a good example of how flexible Patriot Bloodstock has had to become in the tried-horse trading post.

“The traditional platforms are becoming really crowded,” Lloyd said. “Anthony and I are moving forward on finding other avenues to source our tried horses apart from the important places like Gavelhouse, Magic Millions Online and Inglis Digital because the competition is getting really hot now.

“It’s also about finding value,” Manton said. “You can buy a tried horse that on paper looks very good, and you can spend $60,000 or $100,000 on that horse, but it’s about being firm on a price for us, and also digging a little deeper with the form.

“I was mentored early in my career by a form analyst and I worked for corporate bookmakers, and I learned some pretty valuable form principles that have stood the test of time. We apply those form principles to our bloodstock selections when we’re looking for tried horses.”

Manton picks the eyes out of online sales. He’s meticulous and organised. It used to be easier, but these days finding value is harder and harder online and that’s because the digital sales are so populated by keen buyers.

“Inglis Digital is our number one platform,” he said. “But you’ve got to be smarter about it there because no one misses the good ones on Inglis, whereas they can slip through the cracks elsewhere.”

Beer and skittles

A decade ago, syndicate groups didn’t have the digital platforms on which to go shopping or build business models. Groups like Patriot Bloodstock have flourished in the bloodstock climate they’ve created, as too has the likes of Albury trainer Mitchell Beer, who has the bulk of Patriot’s horses.

“Mitch has been incredible for the growth of our business in a lot of different ways,” Manton said. “People want to be involved with Mitch and they don’t even care what horse it is, that’s how popular he is.”

The Patriot-Beer alliance has been ultra-successful. In the southern districts, the Shalaa (Ire) mare Well In Sight was the first horse they raced together and she won on debut at Albury in January this year. She’s since won three races from six starts.

“Within six weeks of her debut, she’d taken all the owners to Flemington for a million-dollar Inglis sprint race,” Manton said. “She’d been bought for $20,000 and she really put us on the map, particularly with Mitch. We couldn’t have asked for a better start.”

Less than two years in, Manton and Lloyd have grown their business, welcomed new owners to racing and criss-crossed much of the east-coast countryside. Parts of the syndicate business have surprised them, and other parts were exactly what they were expecting.

“There’s no way in our wildest dreams did we think the paperwork and due diligence were ever going to be at the levels they’re at, and that was pretty hard to get the hang of,” Lloyd said. “Anthony is a fantastic businessman and very compliant, so I leave all that side of governance to him.

“But equally, we didn’t imagine that when we bought our first horse, we’d be at the stage that we’re at now with 22 horses in work around the districts.”

The two friends have made their entry-level Patriot Bloodstock a thoughtful, affordable and welcoming space, and as much as their names are bobbing around now in the ownership game, they have a good chuckle about the circles they’re moving in.

“With the amount of money we spend on horses (not that much), we don’t get too many favours coming our way,” Manton said, with Lloyd in complete agreement.

“We’re flat out getting a free Pepsi Max anywhere we go,” he said.