Didn't the term "street form" used to refer to leaving shares in the care of your broker, as opposed to having him send you the certs? That way they were still on the "Street", as in Howe or Bay or Wall Street. The term seems to have an opposite meaning nowadays, then again it could be my memory.
It's been 24 years since I took delivery of a certificate. I have the last one in front of me, on the back there is a space to write in the name and address of a transferee and "the attorney of the undersigned" (broker), and a place for the shareholder and a witness to sign. There seems to be no provision for a second and third transfer, looks like the cert must go to the transfer agent and a new cert be made up for the new owner. They all seem to be like that (ouch - Continental Potash, 1966 - everybody should call certs on a few dogs and pull them out periodically for a reality check -g-), although the new ones may be different. I understand that they charge a fee for certs now, they didn't in the olden days.
I wonder if using paper of any kind might be forgoing the great advantages of electronics, we can zip cash and shares around the world so easily. Paper would have some delivery and security problems, maybe, we don't all live in the same city, MacLuhan was right, it's a global village.
You're sure right about the vested interests, stock exchanges are nothing but associations set up by and for their member firms, the stockbrokers. Not hard to hunt for motives here. But they all started somewhere, and that was by curbside trading of paper certs just like you suggest.
What if some enterprising and responsible technoids were to set up an electronic trading system, completely independent of and quite outside the system as it stands today, providing share trading on a fee-for-service basis only? As a pure sharemarket, orders matched by computer, full data and market depth given on the trading screen, and each customer acting as his own broker. The house holding no shares, employing no MMs, and providing no margin - cash on the line before you buy, get your credit elsewhere. It could happen????
But in the meantime it would sure help to get the insider trading posted in a useful form in a reasonable length of time - like five minutes -g-
.............. cheers .................... marcos |
