Nice work if you can get it: Anamoe filly delivers quick profit

A group of horse traders’ belief in Godolphin’s most successful racehorse Anamoe have hit the jackpot, with a filly the star first season sire selling for $800,000 early on day two of the Magic Millions Yearling Sale on the Gold Coast. 

The Lime Country Thoroughbreds-consigned filly was bought by Victorian agent Sheamus Mills in partnership with long-term client Heath Newton, a southern NSW-based lamb processor who is a major supplier to Woolworths. 

The pair owns the Mick Price and Mick Kent Jr-trained Manikato Stakes winner Charm Stone, along with a host of other well-bred fillies and mares.

Wednesday’s sought-after Anamoe filly, who is out of Listed-winning Sebring mare Eawase, has close links to Magic Millions 2YO Classic glory, being a granddaughter of 2011 winner Karuta Queen.

Lime Country paid $340,000 for her as a weanling from the Widden Stud draft at the 2025 Magic Millions National Weanling Sale. She was bred by Victorian Reg Ryan.

The pinhooking result will net the syndicate members more than $300,000 in profit for a little more than six months’ work.

But it’s never as easy as it looks, the pinhooking game, as Lime Country’s Jo Griffin can attest.

“It can go the other way, as was proven last year with another chestnut filly, we paid $360,000 and we are now racing her,” Griffin said. 

“So, with horses like (the Anamoe) and the one last year, I’m always happy to take the punt on really exceptional fillies.

“With this one, I had one trainer say to me, a very good trainer from Randwick, ‘if it looks like that, moves like that, and is bred like that, if it can’t run, the stallion’s no good’. 

“So, I think, on top of the Anamoe factor, she was just a star, and just improved, improved and improved. 

“She had 46 X-ray hits and our highest ever (before Wednesday) was 33.”

The “failed pinhook” Home Affairs filly was bought at the 2024 Magic Millions National Weanling Sale for $360,000 and taken to the following year’s Inglis Easter sale.

But she didn’t receive the support of the buying bench and was passed in for $400,000, remaining the property of the pinhooking partners, who sent her to Warwick Farm trainer Bjorn Baker, the employer of Greg and Jo Griffin’s daughter Georgia.

Mills admitted the first crop progeny of Anamoe were too hard to ignore and “ended up with about four or five of them on my list”. 

“I just thought, from a first-crop stallion – I probably don’t want to say it’s the best we’ve seen since Sepoy, he might let a lot of people down who are going to pay a lot of money for them – but I do think he’s certainly the best-credentialled horse to go to stud for a long, long, long time,” Mills said.

“Then to back that up with the types that he’s put on the ground, I think you need to do that in order to get that wildfire, to get fever pitch (reaction).

“I don’t want to overplay that, but obviously they’ve been extremely well received by lots of people.”

Mills and Newton already have exposure to the family, having paid $1.5 million for Queen Of The Green at the 2020 Magic Millions sale.

A daughter of Written Tycoon and a half-sister to Eawase, Queen Of The Green’s first foal, a filly by Home Affairs, is catalogued for the Inglis Premier Yearling Sale in early March.

While the clearance rate has climbed above 80 per cent, the average so far up on last year and the median holding firm at $200,000 for Griffin, whose Lime Country Thoroughbreds had sold nine yearlings at an average $395,000 by mid-Wednesday, vendors were finding it difficult in the lower end of the market.

“We’ve found it sticky on the under $200,000s. We had a colt go through for $650,000 this morning as well, so the good, athletic horses are selling well,” she said. 

“It’s like any year, but I think there’s a bigger gap in the under $200,000s, which gives me a little pause for thought about the sales going forward, but the money at the top, as always, is endless.”

Griffin reasoned that syndicators who would normally shop in that up to $200,000 bracket were instead taking portions of more expensive yearlings.

“I think the syndicators and trainers are joining forces and buying better horses in a way that they haven’t previously on a larger scale, and that’s affecting that bottom end where a lot of the syndicators might have picked something up there,” she said. 

“They’re batting up with trainers and maybe going for the $400,000 horse.”