My wife inherited a small amount of telecom stock from her grandmonther who worked for AT&T back in the early days. No records had been kept as to when the stocks were bought (they were part of her salary I think). Of course they were all acquired before the Bell breakup. So what she inherited was a big mess of baby bells and about once a year or so one of them will be bought out and they'll do a stock merger and automatically sell any fractional shares left after the merger so we have to pay the Capital Gains on that sale. I am still not sure how someone without a Lexus Nexus account is supposed to calculate the net profit on those shares.

Thus far most of them have been small and we've been calling the entire thing profit (purchase price of $0) but I know one of these days we're going to have to do it for real.