How to Replace Lost a Stock Certificate

If a person loses a stock, bond or other certificate through fire, theft, or whatever, shares registered in the stock holder’s name (as opposed to so-called “street name”) can be replaced fairly quickly and easily. To replace a lost certificate, begin by contacting the appropriate transfer agent. Stock transfer agents are often listed on a

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Stock Price Data

Many people have asked me “how can I get the closing price for stock XY on date Z.” A common variant is to get the close of the Dow Jones Industrial Average (or other stock index) for some given date or range. The answer is that you need to find a provider of historical data

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Stock Price Footnote Abbreviations

Stock prices from the previous day’s trading are printed in tables in most newspapers Tuesday through Saturday, and the week’s activity is commonly summarized on Sunday. These tables use an extremely abbreviated format, including footnotes to indicate various situations. The tables are distributed by the Associated Press. This article lists the most commonly used footnotes

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Stock Price Basis

This article presents a bit of finance theory, namely the basis for a stock’s price. A stock’s price is equal to the net present value (NPV) of all expected future dividends. (See the article elsewhere in the FAQ for an explanation of the time value of money and NPV.) A company will plow its earnings

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Preferred Stock

Preferred stocks combine characteristics of common stocks and bonds. Garden-variety preferred shares are a lot like general obligation bonds/debentures; they are called shares, but carry with them a set dividend, much like the interest on a bond. Preferred shares also do not normally vote, which distinguishes them from the common shares. While today there are

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Outstanding Shares

Data that are frequently reported about a stock are the number of shares outstanding and the float. These two bits of information are not the same thing, although they are closely related. In a nutshell, the outstanding shares (also known as issued shares) are those held by the public but possibly restricted from trading, and

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Company Merger

When one firm takes another over, or merges with another, a number of things can happen to the firm’s shares. The answer is, it depends. In some cases, the shares of one company are converted to shares of the other company. For instance, 3Com announced in early 1997 that it was going to purchase US

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Initial Public Offerings (IPOs)

Introduction to IPOsContents When a company whose stock is not publicly traded wants to offer that stock to the general public, it usually asks an “underwriter” to help it do this work. The underwriter is almost always an investment banking company, and the underwriter may put together a syndicate of several investment banking companies and

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Shareholder Rights

The investor rights movement (sometimes called shareholder rights or shareholder activism) involves people who try to use their shares to make publicly traded companies more accountable to their shareholders. (Please don’t confuse this issue with the topic of the rights of an individual investor with respect to the broker or brokerage firm in case of

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Market Volatility Index (VIX)

The Market Volatility Index (VIX) is a measure of implied volatility in trading of S&P 500 futures on The Chicago Board Options Exchange. The index is calculated using a formula that considers a large number of option strike prices, supposedly in a way based on current financial research and practice. Values for VIX tend to

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