kimberley mine wrote:Something to consider--
ALL nick reports, be they truenicks or werk nicks or what have you, are statistical evaluations. They are thus limited by the size of the population and by the presence of confounding influences.
KMine,
TrueNicks uses all foals, runners, and stakes winners in the population. eNicks
does not use and has never used all foals, starters and stakes winners in creating their rating. They use a population of stakes winners and create a hypothetical result, not a result based on what as actually happened.
kimberley mine wrote: For example, look at the Truenicks rating for Storm Cat over Seeking the Gold. (hypo here:
http://tinyurl.com/yg4ru43)
Truenicks gives this rating a B+, meaning it will get some stakes winners but it's not the best of the best. To determine whether this is a pretty good statistic and NOT likely due to random occurrence or a confounding factor, first go to Equineline or G1 Goldmine or somewhere else and look at how many foals there are on that cross.
As of today, you don't have to go anywhere to get the stats on how many foals, runners, winners, stakes winners are on the cross as the TrueNicks Enhanced Report now supplies all of this and more (breakdown by sex, racing surface, auction results, etc). Truenicks is the only service offering this at this time. This is great information for the thoroughbred breeder as it gives real context to the mating giving you more evaluative tools to use.
kimberley mine wrote: Moving on, if you look at the truenicks hypomating, you will see that 4 out of the 5 top runners bred on that cross are by Giant's Causeway, not Storm Cat himself. Giant's Causeway over Seeking the Gold has about a 17% strike rate for producing stakes winners. This is a confounding factor: the son is throwing to something different than the father, and other sons may throw to different things still. Other examples of confounding factors include the effect of the female line, specific genetic clicks (e.g. Mt. Livermore with Rough'n'Tumble in any form), specific inbreeding not related to sirelines (think Tiznow and Storm Cat, linebreeding to the mare *Papila), and really good phenotype matches (e.g. Point Given with Seattle Slew, both large horses).
That is sometimes true. Invariably new stallions act like their sires - think Fappiano with In Reality and you can see it goes all the way through to sons of Unbridled's Song - but sometimes they will move away from their sireline, or only act like them under specific circumstances. This is where having live data like TrueNicks has is important as as soon as the son makes his mark and has enough runners, a rating can be created specifically for him. It would be a waste of resources for stallion owners and broodmare owners alike if a sire was rated as acting like his sireline, when it is clear that he is not.
kimberley mine wrote: They're useful tools, but keep the bigger picture in mind when you use them.
Never a truer word written on this subject. Paper doesnt run very fast so while getting the genetics right in the first place are important, it is just as important on how the foal is raised, what trainer it goes to, etc.
