The Tax-Free Merger of Shares in Companies

The only way you can share shares in one company for, in the shares of another company is to have a tax-free merger. There are a lot of technical rules about what's tax-free but there's no way that you can own General Motors and transfer it into General Electric stock without a tax and a broker. So the opportunities to switch from one security to another without tax are really limited to merger. It just happens to be that it's the most economical way of finding the person in the world that wants to both buy the stock you want to sell and sell you the stock you Want To Buy.