Tony Cunningham: HotCopper pioneer and CPS Capital founder dies aged 55
The popular Perth stockbroker who helped build and later revive popular share trading gossip platform HotCopper has died.
Tony Cunningham, a co-founder of broking firm CPS Capital, was found dead in Perth’s southern suburbs on Sunday.
Police said the 55-year-old City Beach resident’s death was not suspicious and they would prepare a report for the coroner.
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He founded CPS Capital with Jason Peterson and Paul Sharbanee in 2001 but left the St Georges Terrace-based firm and sold his stake in February last year.
He kept working as a broker with rival Subiaco-based Barclay Wells for about a year before recently joining West Perth-based RM Capital.
UWA Tennis Club on Tuesday praised his achievements in the game and his work reviving its Mt Claremont operation in the early 2000s with a new clubhouse and clay courts.
In a Facebook post, the club said he had achieved a top-level US tennis college scholarship in his youth and had continued to play the game at a high level on returning to Perth.
The former Coolbinia Primary School and Trinity College student used his sporting and social networks to build a successful career as a stockbroker and company promoter.
He started with old-school broking firm DJ Carmichael in the market surge after the downturn of the early 1990s.
He was a renowned capital raiser for battling companies in his early days and honed those skills through much of his broking career.
He was one of Perth’s first brokers to spot the potential of the internet in company promotion and trading chatter, buying a stake in HotCopper from founder Ron Gully in 1995 and working as a moderator on the chat site.
Mr Cunningham floated HotCopper at the height of the dotcom boom in 1999 and investors quickly profited from a takeover by Melbourne-based Bourse data.
“Instead of just being a pub conversation between two people, it’s between thousands of people,” Mr Cunningham told The West Australian in 1999.
“The day traders will buy stock because that’s what’s being mentioned in the forums and they sell at the end of the same day.”
The popular site battled under a variety of owners before being bought back by Mr Cunningham and floated again in 2016.
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Originally published on The Nightly
