This is an actual stock certificate that I own. The black mark you see is not on the actual stock certificate. I put it on there in a paint program as it still has my parent's address and I don't want them to get bombarded with even more junk mail.
You may ask why I didn't sell my shares of stock. Well, these were given to me as part of a settlement. Coleco was found to be tampering with their stock value and somehow were artificially inflating the price. As restitution, they sent everyone who owned stock during a certain period of time, some stock and some money. I received $30.00 and five shares of stock. The only problem was at the time, the stock was only worth a few dollars a share and it cost me $35.00 to sell stock (this was way before the online trading and the low $8.00 a trade fee they have now). So if I sold it, the most I would get back was somewhere between $10.00-$15.00 and it would have cost me $35.00 to do it, so I would have lost $20.00-$25.00, so I decided to just keep the stock and hope it went up. Well, it didn't and Coleco went bankrupt, so now I have a nice little collector's piece! By the way, it is not available for trade or for sale. I just put a picture of it here for your enjoyment.