Matthew Ennis “Gr.1 Goldmine A cut above the rest”

“By harnessing the power of data, G1 Goldmine is designed to give you a competitive edge in thoroughbred breeding.” is the statement on the company website of G1 Goldmine, owned and managed by well-known horseman Matthew Ennis. 

Ennis is an entrepreneur who acquired the company and has been a previous customer. For anyone serious about being an owner or anyone in the breeding industry, this software is invaluable. 

“We started with a horse called Deploy, a beautiful racehorse by Fastnet Rock,” he says, “We used G1 Goldmine at the time, and we had incredible success with Deploy, a multiple-group race winner.”

“He ran in the first Everest back in 2017 behind Redzel. Deploy was the first of a number of horses that we had success with, and it was pretty evident early on that G1 Goldmine had offered us a huge opportunity in terms of eliminating our risk in buying horses and identifying successful horses as well. 

“Most of the horses we purchased reached graded stakes level. That made us more aggressive in trying to purchase more successful types which were exciting,” he said.

Trained by Gerald Ryan & Sterling Alexiou, Deploy won at Group Two level amassing A$831,535 in career earnings. After seeing success with Deploy, Ennis quickly moved to purchase G1 Goldmine. 

“It took us about 18 months to acquire the company. We knew the product and did further research, G1 Goldmine was a real opportunity.

“They had so much success at selecting yearlings and racehorses, but it was clearly under-resourced and needed new impetus. After the acquisition, we spent an additional 18 months of rebranding and resourcing the whole company. That was almost two years ago now and we are very proud of what it has become,” said Ennis. 

With over 50,000 runners to input per week into the system to keep it up to date, Ennis has a massive task of keeping up with this continuous flow of information.

“It is massive and to be honest, the hardest part of the day-to-day running of the company. We have an office, a data hub in Pakistan with a team of about 40 individuals. It's a constant process.

“We get results to feed from a provider, and we have to match up those 50,000 runners a week with generational data, which is a constant battle, but it's highly rewarding as well.”

In a pedigree-dependent industry, tracing lineage is vastly important with results sometimes offering diminishing returns. 

“A lot depends on which tools on the platform the information is required for. Some tools, we've got like pedigree search, searches for an ancestor up to seven or eight generations and then we have stallion match, which only really looks at up to five generations back. 

“In theory, we're set up and geared in a way that we could take it all the way back to the records that we've got in our database depending on the tools and on what is required.”

“The data suggests that the closer you are to the actual runner, the more important that data is. The first three generations tend to be the most important, although there are clear outliers, that go back in the generations, to runners. 

“The data points surrounding the first three generations are the key for a particular runner, current form data, previous form, distance, age, and sex and looking through both sides of the pedigree, sire and dam, is really important and key in my opinion.

“I guess there are clear outliers for the positive and for the negative but generally speaking, I prefer to look at those first three generations,” said Ennis. 

Ennis’ own background in multimedia would not have ended up in a perfect swan dive into the world of big data and analytics. 

“My own background is in multimedia, so it is in the front end that I have a clear interest in. I have a technical mind and I like the idea of bridging the gap between the technical and the simple for our users.

“There are two aspects to it to our business there is the back-end data analysis business where we are building algorithms to essentially identify patterns and identify success and identify negative traits, and there is the front end of the business which is simplifying that analysis and making it clear and simple for customers to break it down.”

“We hire data scientists to do the building of the algorithms and that is way out of my league. To be perfectly frank, it's a bit of a trial-and-error process to find the right individuals to develop these algorithms, it’s not easy, and especially down in Australia now, as we've had our borders closed for so long,” says Ennis. 

“I also think we're moving to a really exciting phase where we now have the database and the numbers to start dipping our toes into the machine learning and AI space, which is undoubtedly where it's going to head towards and that is very exciting.”

“I think the biggest advantage of G1 Goldmine is that we don't assume anything, and we don't have any bias. We purely analyse the stats, and we say it how it is, it's either black or it's white.  

“It is now important in their decision-making as it mitigates risk and getting any small percentage in your favour is essential.”

With The Everest around the corner, Ennis is keen to offer an advantage to anyone analysing the Everest field. 

“What is interesting, after a quick look at this year’s Everest field is that if we look at the past winners of the Everest, every single one of them this year has had either a perfect match rating or a 20/20 match rating with Stallion Match with one of our products. 

“Every winner has had a distance profile of between 1100 and 1600 meters. Distance profile for us is where we look at five generations of the pedigree, we don't just look at the runner, so this is looking at five generations of that winner and at all of the stakes race winners within that generational period. 

“They've all got between 1100 and 1600 meters and the only outlier to the data would be Nature Strip, as he has got a little bit more of a versatile pedigree from 1000 to 2400 meters. But generally, all of them fit the ideal profile for an Everest winner.”

Ennis recounts how he was very fortunate to be involved in the first running of the race, “I'm getting goosebumps now just talking about it, it is something that you will never forget in your life. 

“I've never seen a more diverse crowd at the races, I've never seen as many people at a race event, and you know what hats off to the ATC and Racing New South Wales. 

“They put together a fantastic event, right from the barrier draw until the very end when that winner crosses the line, it's just an amazing event.”

G1 Goldmine with Matthew Ennis at the helm hopes to delve into questions such as how travelling, especially internationally affects a horse’s and his offspring’s performance. 

“There's data around that. And that's something that we'll be looking at no doubt, we haven't done anything with that as yet, but it is something that we're going to be looking into in the future.”

Another key advantage to G1 Goldmine is Stallion Match says Ennis, “We look at five generations of a horse's pedigree, and it cross-references that with five generations of data against all of the global stakes’ winners. It looks to see how similar that hypothetical is to the stakes winner’s pedigrees. 

“So, it's just about deciding whether that horse has a proven pedigree or not. What's interesting is we have just finished a study last week, and although we haven't published anything yet, we found that 11% of stakes winners had a perfect match rating compared to the average of 3%. That's a huge jump and also 56% of stakes winners had a 20/20 match rating and the average again there is 30% so there is definitely something in there for breeders that are looking to breed a horse on a proven pedigree.”

G1 Goldmine has something for everyone, “We have farms who pay for their stallions to be promoted on our platform and what that means is they allow breeders to do searches for free, that's only AUD$400 a year per stallion, says Ennis, “and for the breeder that wants to sign up and start, the prices start from AUD$250 a year so it's very affordable. We try and keep it as low as we possibly can because we believe it really should be available for everyone.”

Ennis has noted the uptick in the use of technology within the industry. 

“Australasia and North America are definitely far more receptive to these products. I think that both of those jurisdictions are where it's at in terms of data. I think Europe and Great Britain are getting there, they're just a little bit slower on the uptake but they will get there,” he said. 

As a big horse racing fan and a former owner of a horse in the race, give us a horse in this year’s Everest that could possibly upset Nature Strip and is Nature Strip a super horse?

“Definitely without a doubt, he is a superhorse, and his pedigree would suggest the same,” said Ennis. “As to beating him, that will be tough, but I would have to say Jacquinot as I think his last start was amazing. I think the pedigree suggests that the distance isn't an issue in terms of speed, but with a hint that a mile is within the distance profile for the future, so yeah, that's my pick. 

G1 Goldmine looks like a company that is only going to get bigger and better in the future, so if you are considering buying or breeding, their website is worth a look at.