New York Stock Exchange

IHOP Corp., Glendale, has filed a listing application with the New York Stock Exchange. The company said trading of its common stock on the NYSE is anticipated to begin in mid-September under the new trading symbol "IHP." The company develops, franchises and operates International House of Pancakes restaurants.

The New York Stock Exchange said its first-quarter earnings tumbled 22% to $22.9 million from $27.9 million a year ago, as a decline in new share listings was compounded by a heavier expense load. New listings, a source of fee income for the nation's largest stock market, slumped to 18 from 32. Expenses rose 17% to $150.4 million. Revenue rose 6.7% to $189 million, as trading jumped 38% to 1.1 billion shares a day from an average of 799.8 million.

Wall Street, America's premier street of capitalism, the playground of bulls and bears, begins at a church and ends at a river. For some, it is the mecca of finance. For others, it's a sinkhole of greed and self-interest. And on May 17, the New York Stock Exchange--the philosophical center of it all--will celebrate its 200th anniversary.

Stock of Culver City-based Protection One, the nation's second-largest residential security alarm company, officially begins trading today on the New York Stock Exchange. Protection One recently merged with the security operations of Western Resources, which now owns 84% of Protection One. Protection One's market capitalization has grown from $55 million in 1994 to more than $1.3 billion. Protection One shares will trade under the ticker symbol POI.

The cramped computer room in an office building overlooking the Harbor Freeway can't match the color and tradition of the New York Stock Exchange. No traders, opening bell or operatic din. Just floor-to-ceiling racks of Dell and Hewlett-Packard computers spitting out a monotonous drone. The only people passing through are janitors and the occasional programmer or electrician. But while the NYSE remains the cynosure of the global markets, much of the world's stock trading emanates from drab computer rooms such as this one in downtown Los Angeles, or in outposts such as Kansas City, Mo., or Jersey City, N.J. These are the epicenters of high-frequency trading, a breed of lightning-fast computerized trading that dominates today's stock market, but which critics say carries risks for investors and for the market itself.

Robert William Haack, 75, who led the drive for automation of the New York Stock Exchange. Beginning as a stockbroker in Milwaukee, Haack moved up to president of the National Assn. of Securities in the mid-1960s and became head of the stock exchange in 1967. During the 1970s he helped Congress develop the Securities Investor Protection Corp. to protect investors if a brokerage collapsed. In the wake of bribery scandals involving Lockheed Co.

The New York Stock Exchange took steps Friday to find a new leader as it continued an increasingly public debate over how to make the Big Board more responsive to the world beyond Wall Street. The NYSE board named director Laurence D. Fink, chairman of New York money-management firm BlackRock Inc., to head a nine-member search committee to find an interim chairman to replace Richard Grasso, who was forced out Wednesday amid an uproar over his $140-million compensation package.

James J. Needham, the first full-time, salaried chairman of the New York Stock Exchange, who presided over the Big Board during the legislative and regulatory tumult of the early 1970s, died Friday at his home in Southampton, N.Y. He was 80 and had myelodysplastic syndrome, a bone marrow disorder.

There's revolt spreading in the Wall Street air. Relax--it has nothing to do with the Dow Jones industrial average or the recession. It's something far more elementary: The New York Stock Exchange plans to extend trading hours. And that's making many brokers from coast to coast very unhappy, especially in the West. The reason: the exchange wants to start trading half an hour earlier. The idea is to win back stock trades occurring overseas, mostly in London, when the NYSE is closed.

He came out of the members' entrance of the New York Stock Exchange with a dazed look on his face and muttering to himself: "Two hundred points it dropped . . . 200 points." He didn't want to talk with the throng of reporters who had gathered on the street, drawn by the deepest plunge in the Dow Jones industrial index since the crash of 1987. What's more, after a day like this, the last thing he was going to give out was his name.