If you have ever been to a garage sale or flea market and purchased anything, you've participated in a FREE MARKET.
"Yes, you can do that, but you have to have the stocks issued in your name (stocks that you're holding through your broker are issued in "street name" to your broker).
If you have a physical stock certificate issued in your name - you just endorse it like you would endorse a check and transfer the ownership. If the stocks don't physically exist - you let the stock registrar know that the ownership has been transferred to someone else.
As to the price - the company doesn't care much about the price of private sales, but the taxing agency will. In the US, for example, you report such a transaction as either a gift (IRS form 709), if the transaction was at a price significantly lower than the FMV (or significantly higher, on the other end), or a sale (IRS form 1040, schedule D) if the transaction was at FMV."
This is America. Home of the free and land of the brave-regardless what our current president infers.
-Tex
