I think it was mentioned above somewhere but stockers is something where economies of scale is a big factor. I run a pretty sizable amount. That helps per head costs, makes smaller percent returns pencil better in relation to desired return to management which can assist in mitigating risk. Also, we can have buyers where the cattle are, dollar cost averaging and putting them together making money on the buy. The guy running 10,000 can exploit these things more than a guys running 1,000 and the guy running 100 hardly can at all.
I mentioned it before that I have a little different view on someone "regularly" making $300/head net. If that were true which it isn't, I would have my doubts on how good of operator they really are. My reason is, in this business, lots and lots of cash is tied up in inventory, which most certainly has a shelf life, in fact they can even die. If $150 equates to 12% net return or so, throwing caution to the wind, every time, with your entire inventory, letting that 10-15% pass you by while chasing 25% (which I should add would be 50% annualized) is reckless, unrealistic and not the conduct of a prudent businessman.
I can honestly say my single most profitable set of cattle I've ever fed in a feed yard was the product of very poor management on my part.
In late 2013 I bought 2 loads of Natural heifers in the panhandle of Texas on a Superior sale one Friday. Normally we feed Natural cattle in Colorado only. A yard where we feed Mexicans in Hereford told me they were feeding a few Naturals at their sister yard up in Spearman and convinced me to send those two loads up to try their COG etc .and save on freight as the cattle were shipping from the Marfa area. As I have said here before, we almost always use some sort of price protection or a tool to limit losses when feeding cattle. The cattle shipped, I paid for them and they went on feed. The feed bills came but they were buried in the statements from the sister yard in Hereford where we had several thousand Mexicans on feed at the time. I didn't notice any differentiation in yards on the reports (a Natural native and a commodity Mexican were feeding similar cost wise at the time, no excuse but the truth) and our bookkeeper had no reason to be looking for it. Long story short, I forgot I owned the cattle, right up until the marketing manager for the yard called on a Wednesday to say I needed to contract them based on bids that Friday to kill the next week. Most of us remember what prices did in that time period. The cattle had about $10/cwt. profit in them with the Natural premium included when I bought them. Those same cattle thanks to my negligence, premium included profited $51/cwt., or about $640/head. The money was real, so was the poor management.
