Bankroll Squeeze

Bankroll Squeeze

Did you ever have a time when the ole’ bankroll was getting squeezed pretty good, and your handicapping seemed to be simply running out of juice?

Naturally.  If you’ve been in the game for even a few months, you have almost certainly gone through “one of those” losing streaks that tested your nerve and your money management approach!

As most of you know, we started issuing the HRG Index again on January 9th subsequent to our usual break after Breeders Cup, and wouldn’t you know it – a monster losing streak hit us pretty much right out of the gate.

We started off with a good-profit first day on the 9th, and the 10th was going okay – but ended up the day with 3 losing races.      And the next two days?!

Well, if you have a strong stomach, and if you want to know how to cope with a blue-moon losing binge . . .

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Desert Story

Desert Story

The Cardon and the Gringo

* Note: the following story has little-to-nothing to do with horse racing – except that it is from the same setting as the “Greatest Race Day” story I posted a while back. This is another vignette from those long-ago times I spent in Baja California Sur – Mexico.

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The last fluttering tendrils of bluish smoke drifted up towards the brick-red rim of the narrow canyon far above. The lazy plume issued from what was left of a giant old Cardon cactus carcass. The once-majestic icon (it had been the only specimen of any size on the canyon floor), was now a smoldering, but still-glowing, crisscross-patterned skeleton – the remaining inner hard-wood that refused to be consumed by the initial flame – that was willing itself to hold together for a bit longer before losing its final vestige of selfness, and crumbling into ash.

Two of the local urchins, Paquito and Sanci Rivera, watched from a thick-trunked, knarled Pomegranite tree that grew at the far edge of their grandfather’s property. Shirtless Paquito was smiling in rapt attention at the proceedings while astraddle one of the lower branches. Cute little Sanci was sitting in the dust below – alternating between hunched-forward silent concentration, and screaming, gleeful, hand-clapping – all the while cooling her brown feet in the slushy mud of a shallow irrigation ditch . . .

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