Is it possible to physically own a share certificate in a company?
"Yes, this is possible with some companies. When you buy shares of stock through a stock broker, the shares are kept in ""street name.""  That means that the shares are registered to the broker, not to you.  That makes it easy to sell the stock later.  The stock broker keeps track of who actually owns which shares.  The system works well, and there are legal protections in place to protect the investors' assets. You can request that your broker change the stock to your name and request a certificate from the company.  However, companies are no longer required to do this, and some won't.  Your broker will charge you a fee for this service. Alternatively, if you really only want one share for decoration, there are companies that specialize in selling shares of stock with certificates.  Two of them are giveashare.com and uniquestockgift.com, which offer one real share of stock with a stock certificate in certain popular companies.  (Note: I have no experience with either one.)  Some companies no longer issue new stock certificates; for those, these services sell you a replica stock certificate along with a real share of electronic stock.  (This is now the case for Disney and Apple.) With your stock certificate, you are an actual official stockholder, entitled to dividends and a vote at the shareholder meeting. If this is strictly an investment for you, consider the advantages of street name shares: As to your question on buying stock directly from a company and bypassing a broker altogether, see Can I buy stocks directly from a public company?" There is a company that will sell you single paper shares of stock for many companies and handle framing. But you pay a large premium over the stock price. Disney stopped doing paper share certificates a while ago, but you should be able to buy some of the old ones on eBay if you want.
"It is not a ""riskless"" transaction, as you put it. Whenever you own shares in a company that is acquiring or being acquired, you should read the details behind the deal. Don't make assumptions just based on what the press has written or what the talking heads are saying. There are always conditions on a deal, and there's always the possibility (however remote) that something could happen to torpedo it. I found the details of the tender offer you're referring to. Quote: Terms of the Transaction [...] The transaction is subject to certain closing conditions, including   the valid tender of sufficient shares, which, when added to shares   owned by Men’s Wearhouse and its affiliates, constitute a majority of   the total number of common shares outstanding on a fully-diluted   basis. Any shares not tendered in the offer will be acquired in a   second step merger at the same cash price as in the tender offer. [...] Financing and Approvals [...] The transaction, which is expected to close by the third quarter of   2014, is subject to satisfaction of customary closing conditions,   including expiration or termination of the applicable waiting period   under the Hart-Scott-Rodino Antitrust Act.  Both Men’s Wearhouse and   Jos. A. Bank are working cooperatively with the Federal Trade   Commission to obtain approval of the transaction as soon as possible. [...] Essentially, there remains a small chance that one of these ""subject to..."" conditions fails and the merger is off. The chance of failure is likely perceived as small because the market price is trading close to the deal price. When the deal vs. market price gap is wider, the market would be less sure about the deal taking place. Note that when you tender your shares, you have not directly sold them when they are taken out of your account. Rather, your shares are being set aside, deposited elsewhere so you can no longer trade them, and later, should the conditions be satisfied, then you will be paid for your shares the deal price. But, should the deal fall apart, you are likely to get your shares deposited back into your account, and by that time their market value may have dropped because the price had been supported by the high likelihood of the transaction being completed. I speculated once on what I thought was a ""sure deal"": a large and popular Canadian company that was going to be taken private in a leveraged buyout by some large institutional investors with the support of major banks. Then the Global Financial Crisis happened and the banks were let off the hook by a solvency opinion. Read the details here, and here. What looked like a sure thing wasn't. The shares fell considerably when the deal fell apart, and took about four years to get back to the deal price." Vesting As you may know a stock option is the right to acquire a given amount of stock at a given price.  Actually acquiring the stock is referred to as exercising the option.  Your company is offering you options over 200,000 shares but not all of those options can be exercised immediately. Initially you will only be able to acquire 25,000 shares; the other 175,000 have conditions attached, the condition in this case presumably being that you are still employed by the company at the specified time in the future.  When the conditions attached to a stock option are satisfied that option is said to have vested - this simply means that the holder of the option can now exercise that option at any time they choose and thereby acquire the relevant shares. Dividends Arguably the primary purpose of most private companies is to make money for their owners (i.e. the shareholders) by selling goods and/or services at a profit.  How does that money actually get to the shareholders?  There are a few possible ways of which paying a dividend is one.  Periodically (potentially annually but possibly more or less frequently or irregularly) the management of a company may look at how it is doing and decide that it can afford to pay so many cents per share as a dividend.  Every shareholder would then receive that number of cents multiplied by the number of shares held. So for example in 4 years or so, after all your stock options have vested and assuming you have exercised them you will own 200,000 shares in your company.  If the board declares a dividend of 10 cents per share you would receive $20,000.  Depending on where you are and your exact circumstances you may or may not have to pay tax on this. Those are the basic concepts - as you might expect there are all kinds of variations and complications that can occur, but that's hopefully enough to get you started. "This is kind of halfway between the stuff I was talking about, and halfway to the stuff I don't want to get into. But it raises some very legitimate and relevant points that are kind of separate from the ""gold standard"" debate.   The big question, taking the banks out of it, is a two-fold one, that goes something like this:   - Is it possible to have a modern economy without credit-markets? and...  - Is it possible to have functional credit-markets without some sort of fractional-reserve currency?  For example, let's say Toyota decides to design a new car. Before they can sell a single unit, someone in Africa or somewhere has to dig up the minerals to make it, someone has to design it, tools have to be re-worked, all that kind of stuff. Building ONE CAR of a new design might cost [a billion dollars or more](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lexus_LS).   Obviously it's not realistic for Toyota to expect the first customer to pay that much: they amortize the design and tooling costs over the expected production run or whatever. Moreover, we might say that only companies that have amassed a billion dollars in physical gold from previous sales should be *able* to do that kind of thing...  But there is a relevant question of whether this makes any kind of sense. Should Toyota have to literally ship palettes or dufflebags of physical gold through middlemen and suppliers to the miner in Africa, down to the actual guy who digs up the aluminum or whatever, in order to make this transaction happen?   How would that work, without some sort of intermediary ""promises""?   I'm imagining a scenario where Toyota sends an armored truck full of gold out to go find half-a-ton of aluminum. The drivers cannot rely on any promises or ""fractional reserve"", they must only trade the physical gold in their truck for actual aluminum or expenses along the way...   This starts to defy sanity, in a modern economy. You have to rely on the promises of middle-men and suppliers and contractors and so on. And the instant you have promises, you have fractional reserves, because people are getting paid and money is changing hands that hasn't been minted yet.   It's not just the impracticality of your local supermarket having to trade a bag full of gold for a shipment of lettuce, it's that contracts to purchase would be meaningless, because the driver would have had to give a smaller bag of gold to the supplier, who gave a smaller bag of gold to the grower, and so on... moreover, the supermarket would have to just wait to see what entrepreneurial driver shows up and what they have.   The supermarket obviously cannot ""order"" a hundred heads of lettuce per week with a promise to pay, not unless we also give the supplier permission to order a hundred heads of lettuce a week from the grower, and the grower permission to order seed and hire workers sufficient to grow a hundred heads of lettuce a week, and the workers permission to set up car-payments to get to work, and the seed-supplier to so on and so on...  That sequence of promises is ipso-facto a ""fractional reserve"" system, with or without a central bank. People are promising to deliver gold/cash/whatever that they don't currently have. Moreover, it is entirely possible in a gold-denominated currency for everyone to *keep* those promises, since the gold, like any currency, just keeps changing hands and cycling through the economy.   Your example of ""gold certificates"" is exactly equivalent to privately-arranged contracts/promises to produce a certain amount of gold on completion. It's promises all the way down, unless we insist on instant cash-transactions, e.g., literally handing an employee a dollar's worth of gold every five minutes, or whatever. If the employee is counting on the good-faith of the employer to settle up at the end of the day or week, then we have a fractional-reserve system whether decreed or not.   When you buy an iPhone or a laptop, someone had to dig up the stuff to make it, out of the ground. When you buy a cheeseburger, someone had to grow wheat and someone else had to raise and kill a cow. It's not a reasonable proposition that they should wait for you to show up with a bag of gold before doing those things, in this day and age.   We trade in promises and IOUs. Sometimes that backfires, sometimes catastrophically. But it's remarkable how well it *does* work, most of the time, and how much better it works than the times and places where people had to trade physical goods for physical goods.   This is not an argument against a gold-backed currency." Both Scottrade and ING Direct (CapitalOne) have physical branches. Scottrade are wide-spread, ING/CapitalOne are less common (in California where I live, I have a bunch of Scottrade branches around where I live, but the only ING presence I know of is in LA on Sepulveda at Santa Monica). So one way to verify the company is legit is to go to their physical location and talk to the people there. Similarly, you can find physical locations in major metropolitan areas for many other web-based discount brokers. In my area (SF Bay Area) we have Scottrade, ETrade, Fidelity, TD Ameritrade, and that's just those I've actually seen with my own eyes. You can just walk in and talk to the people there about their options and their web operations. It is hard and unlikely for a sting operation to set up a web of brick-and-mortar offices across the nation. Even Madoff had only one or two offices. Of course I totally agree with Chris's answer, especially with regards to the SSL certificates' verification and spoofing and phishing avoidance. "Great question, and here is the answer. No. Shares in 401k plans are never registered to an individual while the money is held in the plan. That goes for stock or mutual funds. Technically your account is never ""yours"" until you request a distribution from the plan.   Most people do not understand this, and it's not the easiest of concepts to understand or be willing to grasp." You'll own whatever fraction you bought. To own the company (as in, boolean - yes or no) you need to buy 100% of the outstanding stock. RE controlling the company, in general the answer is yes - although the mechanism for this might not be so straight forward (ie. you may have to appoint board members and may only be able to do so at pre-set intervals) and there may be conditions in the company charter designed to stop this happening. Depending on your jurisdiction certain ownership percentages can also trigger the need to do certain things so you may not be able to just buy 50% - in Australia when you reach 20% ownership you have to launch a formal takeover bid. "The best place to start looking is the companies ""Balance Sheet"" (B/S).  This would show you the total shares ""outstanding."" The quarterly B/S's arent audited but a good starting point.  To use in any quant method, You also need to look a growth the outstanding shares number. Company can issue shares to any employee without making a filing.  Also, YOU will NEVER know exactly the total number because of stock options that are issued to employees that are out of the money arent account for. Some companies account for these, some dont.  You should also explore the concepts of ""fully dilute"" shares and ""basis"" shares. These concepts will throw-off your calc if the company has convertible bonds." I'll give it a shot, even though you don't seem to be responding to my comment. SIPC insures against fraud or abuse of its members. If you purchased a stock through a SIPC member broker and it was held in trust by a SIPC member, you're covered by its protection. Where you purchased the stock - doesn't matter. There are however things SIPC doesn't cover. That said, SIPC members are SEC-registred brokers, i.e.: brokers operating in the USA. If you're buying on the UK stock exchange - you need to check that you're still operating through a US SIPC member. As I mentioned in the comment - the specific company that you mentioned has different entities for the US operations and the UK operations. Buying through them on LSE is likely to bind you with their UK entity that is not SIPC member. You'll have to check that directly with them.