MyRacehorse, an application that allows the average person to buy horses like stock, has recently gone national wide and is currently available in 43 states, New York included.
Michael Behrens the CEO Experiential Squared and founder of MyRacehorse, said that he was originally intrigued by crowd funding campaigns, where projects can be funded by common people a little at a time, and wondered why no one had done something similar for sports.
It turned out that other people had had the same thought, but that there was a lot of legal restrictions on it. Still, Behrens hired lawyers for the legal side and took on a partner to help build the app.
It launched in California last June, and Behrens said it currently has around 35 horses, with most sold out and about five available with a few new entries every couple of weeks.
Payout works exactly as seems reasonable. If you own 5% of the horse and it wins a race, you get 5% of the winnings.
Behrens said that MyRacehorse rarely buys all of the horse. Instead, they will leave some of it for interested parties like the trainer. That way, the people who know how to train the horse and keep it in top condition have a stake in the winnings.
One example of a horse that MyRacehorse bought a percentage of is Wayne O, who as a yearling sold for $750,000. Wayne O sold on the app for $95 per share, with each share being 0.01% of the horse.
If Wayne O wins a race, everyone with even a single share gets a part of the payout. If they keep their shares, then they get a payout every time Wayne O wins.
Behrens said that he has two long term plans for the app. First, create a system to give people something to do with their shares. Instead of just passively winning occasionally, the shares of a horse that consistently wins increase in value like the stock of a company doing well. Owners can then sell their shares to other people and make a profit on their original investment.
Second, he wants to expand out to other sports, since MyRacehorse works as a platform, but the idea can be expanded into essentially any other sport by following the same general model.
For more information, visit www.myracehorse.com.
