Top Domains: Forexpros Buys Investing.com For $2.45M, Launches One-Stop Financial Portal For Everyday Investors

Whether they’re .com, .org, .biz or .awesome, domain names can be significant — and some would likely argue that a memorable, premium domain is worth a pretty penny, maybe even priceless. Picking up a name that’s easy to remember can be a boon for traffic and can add a little brand protection to a company’s arsenal. While big purchases often go unreported, top domain names have been known to fetch a high price, with “insure.com” and “sex.com” ranking as the highest on record at $16 million and $13 million, respectively.

Today, we can add another one to the list, as financial website Forexpros.com has purchased “Investing.com” for $2.45 million, making it the [second] largest (known) purchase of a single domain name in 2012. [Update: We’ve since learned that CardLab purchased GiftCard.com for approximately $4 million in October of this year.] Before then, dudu.com and personalloans.com ranked the highest, each selling for an estimated $1 million. According to Domaining.com, the sale puts Investing.com among the top 26 or so domain names purchased, right between coupons.com and tom.com. The largest known sale of 2011? Why that would be the purchase of social.com by Salesforce.com, of course.

With the purchase, Forexpros will today launch a global financial portal under the Investing.com URL, where it plans to offer a free resource for novice and semi-professional traders and investors to find realtime quotes and charts, breaking news, financial tools, technical analysis and calendars.

According to Forexpros founder and CEO Dror Efrat, the site will service all asset classes, including stocks, bonds, commodities, futures and Forex. As to why the company decided to shell out $2.45 million for the purchase? Efrat and the company’s 70 employees want to turn Investing.com into a one-stop shop for financial traders and investors around the globe by providing streaming, realtime data and financial analytics. The user-friendly, memorable domain name is a small (and somewhat expensive) step in that direction.

The founder says that Investing.com will be looking to differentiate itself from the biggest entities in the space (like Bloomberg and Reuters) by offering its content for free, including that which would generally fall under the “premium membership” umbrella on other sites and by appealing to novice and semi-professional traders and investors, rather than pros and large firms. The site will also be accessible in 18 languages, which the founder hopes will help it reach a larger, international audience.

Investing.com has over 70 employees in offices located throughout the world, with its largest branches in Cyprus, Madrid and Tel Aviv. According to Efrat, Forexpros.com, which was founded in 2007, was averaging 3.6 million unique users per month before the company decided to go big and re-brand under Investing.com.

“We are thrilled to launch investing.com today and believe that with our streaming real-time data, powerful analysis tools and great interface we can become a preeminent financial portal for novice and semi-professional investors and traders,” Efrat tells TechCrunch.

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