Stocks and bonds are the most well-known kinds of investment securities, but mutual fund shares, limited partnership shares, and just about any medium which permits investment in an enterprise or financial participation in a business may fall within the scope of the rules in Article 8. Article 8 has a long and honored lineage. Before the Uniform Commercial Code there was the Uniform Stock Transfer Act of 1909. This Act became Article 8 when the Uniform Commercial Code was promulgated in 1951. Article 8 was also extensively amended in 1977.
Investment securities are intangible property.
A share of stock in a corporation is a share in an abstraction that primarily gives the owner a right to share in the income of the corporation. There is nothing that the owner can see, feel, or otherwise experience that constitutes the corpus of his or her interest. The corporation's tangible property is the corporation's, not the property of any shareholder. The shareholder's rights have no corporeal existence. The intangibility of investment securities has meant historically that their transfers from one person to another require some special rules.