Stock Price Archeology

April often brings us a spate of income tax related questions about the price of a stock on a particular date. The questions are usually from people who want to establish the cost basis of a stock for tax purposes.  Many standard financial databases can supply daily prices (high, low, close and volume) at least for the companies on the New York Stock Exchange as far back as the early 1960’s.

Table 1.

Here are the earliest dates available for daily prices of General Electric Company (GE) on several financial files.