Not a Tax issue

There are dealers. Here's one selling a specimen:

Dunno whether real certificates are more or less valuable than specimens, but you can always call a few dealers and ask.

The historical price look up tool on INTC.com indicates a 1972 price (July 29 rather arbitrarily chosen) of 4 cents a share. The current price is $28.86 or so. Find it REAL hard to believe. Since you have the actual certificates you might be able to talk to someone in the shareholder services at Intel to see if they can tell you basis price. Looking at a couple of sites for selling collectible stock certificates (non-specific to INTC) the average price for a very old stock certificate of defunct companies seems to run around $35 for the certificate and NOT per share. As an aside, if you happen to have a stock certificate from the Houdini Picture Company signed by the man Himself that is an outlier currently worth around $7,000.

They've had a lot of stock splits:

One 1972 share is about 1215 current shares, so it sounds right. That would have been about $48/share in 1972.

Yup. I'd still call some dealers and see what it's worth, but expect the stock will be a lot more valuable than the certificate.

The "Total Return Calculator" at INTC.com shows that 1 share bot

7/29/72 would be worth $47,500 today. 8-)

There were 13 splits since 7/29/72.

Thanks for taking my basic information and run it through the rest of the way. I only knew that figuring stock splits was WAY beyond my expertise. (grin).

There are a variety of issues if you sell a certificate to a collector. If Intel won't re-register the stock to the collector without receiving and retiring the certificate, you will remain the owner of record and will receive future dividends and stock splits. In this case you have sold the stock certificate and not the underlying stock and both you and the collector should understand and agree to this. Companies have procedures (check with Intel about theirs and how much they charge) to invalidate 'misplaced' certificates and to reissue the stock to the owner of record so you (or your heirs) may be able to sell the stock even if you have previously sold or otherwise disposed of the certificate.

To answer your specific question: When going thru the records of elderly friends and family who kept stock in certificate form, I always noticed that additional stock was issued when a stock split and the old certificate was not retired. Assuming INTC followed the same process, the current stock market value of any certificate for N INTC shares is approximately $29 (INTC stock price) x N. If you have circa 1972 certificates for small numbers of shares, it is possible that the collectible value of the certificate is greater than the stock market value.

At one time (circa 2002) INTC sold for over $70/ shr ( v

85% of the quarterly period low price or via vested stock options.

When each split occured, INTC issued new (paper, in my case) shares; while I retained the original issue.

BTW INTC now pays $0.96/ shr in annual dividends.