[VLM]

"I pretty much just bought a single share to say I had one"

Depending on your social circle, this gets done with kids a lot, especially with an old fashioned issued paper share instead of electronic. Decades ago Disney used to have quite an elaborate paper stock certificate for this purpose and they obviously used their professional artists and graphics designers. My local electric company in comparison looked little better than a secretary hand typed it, which might be how they made it... Perhaps they still do this. Its hard to find a corporation worth endorsing to my kids like this.

Also during the first dotcom boom there were at least a couple people collecting paper certificates from dotcoms and they still trade among themselves to this day as collectibles.

Just some interesting ideas to think about / google about.

[njharman]

> Depending on your social circle, this gets done with kids a lot

Ha! At first I thought you meant "done with kids" as some people make'm so they can say they have one.

[VLM]

LOL more like my hippy anti-capitalist protestor friends probably would not find it funny to give their kid a share of GM or BRK.B, or give a share of BP to tree hugger's kids. If I had any friends who were hard core anti-gun, then a share of Ruger for their kid would go over about as well.

[protomyth]

A lot of Green Bay Packer fans have shares of the team (they had another stock purchase some years back). It makes for a nice thing to have framed during football season.

[snowwrestler]

At least with Packer shares you know in advance it's not a good financial decision, because they don't appreciate or return dividends. It's basically just a certificate of fandom.

(I still almost bought one though.)

[gregparadee]

I have one of these from Coca-cola

[VLM]

Ah I see via some google that there are now trading companies set up for this, simply give them some money via CC and you get the cert in the mail already mounted in a frame maybe with an engraved plaque. This takes some of the "fun" out of it.

http://www.giveashare.com/stockcertificates.shtml

Keeping it on topic, you'll be out about $200 for a nicely framed paper share from Tesla Motors, at least from these guys.

Back in the old days, or at least in the 70s, this was a much more complicated manual process where you'd have to call your broker and pay a ridiculous commission and usually a relatively modest (compared to recently...) delivery fee, and then frame it yourself, and possibly engrave a plaque yourself, etc.

Also looks like paper shares are going completely away, which is really too bad, as they were a kinda cool gift idea. From a purely PR perspective you'd think the marketing dept would keep it on life support, at least at some companies, even if it moves out of the finance dept. Perhaps an attractive one page sign declaring you're a shareholder, as opposed to formal legal stock certificates. Maybe it'll all be "mozilla open badge system" instead LOL.

The dotcom collector guys are going to be sad that literally no facebook paper share certificates will ever be issued, for example. All electronic now via the DRS. I was in financial services industry about 20 years ago and I'm astounded it took this long to eliminate paper... Had to wait for the dinosaurs to die off I guess.