RagingBull.com

RagingBull.com was founded in August 1997 by Bill Martin with college partners^[1] Rusty Szurek and Greg Wright, who were 19 years old at the time, as a hobby.^[2] It was begun in a basement with an initial investment of $30,000 from savings and credit card loans.^[3]

By mid-1998, the website had 8,000 registered users.^[4]

David Wetherell, CEO of CMGI, discovered the website while on vacation.^[3] In October 1998, CMGI invested $2 million in Raging Bull for a 40% stake.^[5] At that time, the co-founders were each 21 years old.^[4]

In February 2000, AltaVista, which was majority owned by CMGI, acquired the website in a stock transaction. At that time, Raging Bull had 425,000 registered members, 12 million daily page views, and message boards where users posted 35,000 messages per day.^[6][1]

In January 2001, Terra acquired the website.^[7][8][9]

In February 2006, Terra's Lycos division sold Quote.com and RagingBull.com to Interactive Data Corporation for $30 million, which integrated them into eSignal.^[10]

In June 2017, Chuck Jaffe was named chief editor of the website.^[11] After a short, 6-month "experiment" with Jaffe as editor, the site changed direction and Jaffe was released from his position.^[12]

In December 2020, the Federal Trade Commission accused the company of defrauding consumers out of more than $137 million over the previous three years and making it difficult for customers to cancel their monthly subscriptions.^[13] In December 2021, the owners of the site agreed to pay $700,000 in refunds to New Hampshire customers and an additional $675,000 in administrative fines to settle claims by state securities regulators.^[14] In March 2022, RagingBull.com as well Sherwood Ventures LLC and defendants Jason Bond and Jeff Bishop paid $2.425 million to settle what the FTC called "bogus stock earnings claims" and a hard to cancel subscription service. The company also agreed to modify certain marketing practices.^[15][16]