AboutPaul Henneman Expertise Stock forecasting and fair market valuations.
Experience
Past/Present clients CBSMarketwatch.com, Hoovers.com, Multexinvestor.com, Bank of NY, numerous hedge funds and institutions, other partners and clients can be viewed at http://www.valuengine.com/about/careers.html
Question I don't know if old stocks in family record box have any value.
1.25 shares of Elgin Motor Car Corp, 01/11/1921
2.100 shares of Commercial Coal & Coke Company, 10/05/1920
3. 75 share of Public Life Insurance Company, 08/23/1922
4. 100 dollar bond of Mill City Cotton Mills of Indiana, 08/27/1920
Answer Lester,
I do have a few suggestions for you on how you can do some research to find out if your certificates are worth anything. Usually such old certificates no longer have any value, but in rare instances the company does still trade, or has been acquired by a company at some point under a different name that still trades.
The first thing is to visit http://finance.yahoo.com and search by company name. If it still trades under the same name, it will come up.
If you cannot find anything there, I would suggest doing some google searches to see if you can locate the company's website, and article, or any information that would inform you of the history of the company.
If you are able to locate the company, the best thing to do is to contact their investor relations department. Every public company should have one, and usually there is a clear link on their corporate home page to find the appropriate phone number or email address to send your inquiry to.
If you don't find anything through the methods above, you could try hiring a service to do a professional search for you. As I said earlier, it is most likely that you will find that the stock is no longer traded, but in some cases there can be a better result. Below is a link to some of the services that are offered which can do a professional search for you, usually costing between $30 and $100 for each company: http://www.sec.gov/answers/oldcer.htm
another website to check out: http://www.kiplinger.com/columns/ask/archive/2004/q1108.htm
If all of the above fails, the certificates themselves could have some value as there is a collector market for the actually document. To see if any of those certificates have value, you could do some searches on Ebay to find out what similar certificats are selling for, or visit http://www.oldstocks.com/ which is a specialty website for this.
I hope that the above helps, and best of luck in your searches!
Sincerely,
Paul Henneman
President
ValuEngine Inc
www.ValuEngine.com
(917) 710-3088
