You might grow to wish you didn't have it. It's a pain to hold a physical stock certificate with actual value. Put that sucker in a safe deposit box, if you ha

You might grow to wish you didn't have it. It's a pain to hold a physical stock certificate with actual value. Put that sucker in a safe deposit box, if you haven't already. If you lose it, you'll be in for a bureaucratic nightmare of indemnity bonds (which are expensive!) and notaries to get your money. And on the happy day you get to exchange your piece of paper for cash, you get to live through the unique experience of trusting a huge sum of money to the postal service. It's a like backing up your computer on a local hard drive because you don't trust cloud providers: the chance that a law firm will lose your certificate is a lot lower than the chance that you will.