Shares that go up as banks go down

‘Whenever there’s a catastrophe on Wall Street, our business just gets better — because our products become more collectable.’ So says Bob Kerstein, founder of Virginia-based Scripophily.com, the world’s largest buyer and seller of historic bonds and share certificates.

The recent blizzard of insurance and investment banking failures has brought Kerstein particularly brisk business. ‘Our Merrill Lynch certificates are selling very well, and we’re almost completely out of Bear Sterns certificates,’ he says. ‘A few months ago you could buy a Merrill Lynch certificate for about $20 or $30. Now they’re worth upwards of $100.’

The collectors’ market in early and historically significant bonds and share certificates first took off during the 1970s. By 1978, the hobby had become so popular that the Financial Times held a competition to come up with a name for it. The winning entry was ‘scripophily’ — ‘scrip’ is a term for a currency substitute, while ‘-ophily’ is a derivative of the Greek for ‘love’.