Industry Internet Headquarters Tyler | Website www.ragingbull.com Founded 1997 | |
Products Stock Boards and Web Portal | ||
RagingBull.com is a website that offers online investors financial message boards with discussions and commentary that focus on stocks, mutual funds, global issues, business and political topics in addition to charts, news and free, real-time stock quotes. On the Raging Bull site, users can post messages and read messages by others, create and manage their own public or private boards in member forums, search posts for relevant discussions, scan sector and industry categories to locate company message boards, as well as stay updated on the day's news stories.
The site’s in-house message board technology features an "Ignore" command to filter out unwanted postings and a personalized "My Raging Bull" home page, which tracks users’ preferred boards and members. One section of RagingBull.com, “BullsEye”, is a weekly online magazine with education for active traders on trading strategies and nuances in the markets.
History
Founded in August 1997, RagingBull.com was the brain child of Bill Martin with college partners, Rusty Szureck and Greg Wright, and was begun in a basement with an initial investment of $20,000. Through grass-roots marketing, in 3 months, they increased the site’s page views from 0 to 150,000 pages a day. Late in the summer of 1997, David Wetherell of CMGI, the Andover- based Internet investment company, noticed the site and made an offer: CMGI would invest $2 million in Raging Bull for a 40 percent stake.
In 1999, the website grew 1 to 3 percent a day and by the fall of 1999, it had 8 to 10 million page views a day. As a result, that summer they raised another $20 million from CMGI and CNET. In that same time period, they signed ad deals with major firms Fidelity Investments, Morgan Stanley and National Discount Brokers. This brought the website’s revenue up from approximately $1,500 to the millions of dollars and the staff from 3 to 60 employees.
In November 1999, the web search engine, AltaVista, controlled by CMGI, bought out Raging Bull in a cash-and-stock deal valued at $168 million. CMGI planned an April 2000 public stock offering for AltaVista amid the soaring market for Internet stocks. Then, the April NASDAQ nose dive started, and the IPO was scrubbed. AltaVista had lost millions, and in December, it put Raging Bull, which had dwindled to 35 employees, up for sale.
In January 2001, Internet services company Terra Lycos acquired RagingBull.com from CMGI Inc.'s AltaVista unit for less than $15 million. They planned to combine the website with its existing financial services offerings, which included Quote.com and the Spanish-language Invertia.com. In August 2004, Daum Communications Corp., an operator of Korean websites, acquired the Lycos unit from Terra for just $95 million. This included several services, among which was RagingBull.com. In February 2006, Lycos sold Quote.com to Interactive Data Corporation for $30 million. Among the products included in this sale was the RagingBull.com website. Subsequent redesigns of the site have completely changed its look and feel and included new content, such as the previously described BullsEye section with trading education.
On June 30, 2011, BlueWave Advisors, LLC, purchased RagingBull.com.
On August 5, 2013, with no notice to its users, RagingBull.com's message board software underwent sweeping changes, rendering the board nearly unusable for many of its users.
On August 12, 2013, RagingBull Admin posted this message:
Greetings Folks,Wanted to bring everyone up to speed on the update and some up coming changes to the site.On August 5 we implemented an overhaul of the Ragingbull site, this overhaul is on going, what you see now is just the first stage, we still have quite a long list of features that are going to be implemented. There are many reasons we did this overhaul, one of which was stability. The systems Ragingbull was built on, hardware wise, was extremely old to say the least, we needed to upgrade it, and needed to overhaul the code the site ran on for both stability and security purposes. Naturally we had planned on having plenty more features available upon release, but due to some unforeseen circumstances, the timeline had to be accelerated. I know plenty of you folks are used to silence from the admins of RagingBull, and I am here to tell you that ends now. We have a full staff of developers and will soon have a full staff of moderators.Part of the new changes will be listening to the community, RagingBull is first, and foremost, yours. We are nothing without our users. So please, if you see something you'd like added, if you have an idea you'd like to tell us about, if you see a problem or have a question, our doors (inboxes) are always open to you via the feedback link at the bottom of the page.These are some of the following changes that are being worked on, in a non-specific order:- Anti-spam- Ignore Functionality- Ability to go from one topic to the next without returning to the main board.- Stock Ticker Charts/Graph Functionality- Option for Chronological post sorting (see posts in order of the original post, not the latest reply) (still looking into this one)And plenty more.If anyone has any suggestions they'd like to see, or any comments/concerns they'd like to bring to our attention, please feel free to contact me at Via the feedback link at the bottom of the page.Also, a common concern lately has been people seeing their email in the profile page. This is only visible to the person logged into the account, people can not see other peoples emails, only their own.Looking forward to working with you folks.- RagingBull Support