AboutPaul Henneman Expertise Stock forecasting and fair market valuations.
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Expert: Paul Henneman Date: 1/23/2008 Subject: Midland United Company
Question I found 2 stock certificates for Midland United Company with my grandmother's
name on them. Are they worth anything more than the just the paper collectors
value I see on several sites?
Answer June,
Thank you for your question!
Generally there are two ways to approach this.
The first is happily free, no charge, and comprises of two things. General google searches to find out the history of the company, and company name search through a site such as Yahoo finance to see if they still currently trade under the same name.
The google search is necessary since the company may have changed names, merged, or been aquired by another public company. This would mean that the stock certificates could still be worth something, but not under that name.
I could not find anything conclusive using either of the above searches.
The second thing you can do is pay for a service to do a complete search, this is really the only way to know for sure. However, these services charge a fee. Below is a link on the governements SEC website to several such services that you can try if interested. While this is the only way to know for sure, generally the chances are that you will find that the stock certificates are no longer worth anything, other than possibly as collectors items. So there is risk here, in that you pay a fee for the research, and will likely find that the certificates hold no intrinsic value. There are always exceptions of course.
If you do find that the certificates have no investment value, some general google searches or Ebay are good sources to see if there is any value as a collectible.
I hope that this helps! Please do not hesitate to reply if I can be of any additional service,
Sincerely,
Paul Henneman
President
ValuEngine Inc
www.ValuEngine.com
