Fractions

NEW YORK -- They were trading stocks in New York in quarters and halves, rather than dollars and cents, as early as the 18th century. But that practice will die before the 21st century arrives.The New York Stock Exchange, the world's largest stock market, said yesterday that it plans to begin trading stocks in dollars and cents by Jan. 1, 2000, and hopes to do so sooner.Richard Grasso, the Big Board's chairman, said the move is needed because price movements are occurring in progressively smaller fractions.

They're some of the priciest condos in the city, but they're taxed like empty lots. At the Ritz-Carlton Residences along Baltimore's Inner Harbor — where a recent sale topped $1.5 million — the tax bill for most of the condos was $1,309 apiece this year. At Silo Point, an industrial conversion with gourmet kitchens, hardwood floors and sweeping views of the city, the bill for many of the units is $238 each. Even though they were built years ago, and city inspectors declared them ready to live in, they are still valued for tax purposes as though construction never got off the ground.

In his 30 years in the investing game, professional money manager James Hardesty has developed an appreciation for the traditions that guide his industry. Veteran investors such as Hardesty - the president of Baltimore-based Hardesty Capital Management, a downtown investment advisory firm - have mixed feelings about the industry plan to replace fractions with decimals when it comes to quoting and trading stocks. On one hand, the conversion will end a centuries-old practice with which long-term players have grown quite comfortable.

State biologists have found "concentrated pockets" of dead oysters in the upper Chesapeake Bay, which they blame on a record-high influx of fresh water into the estuary this year. But the die-off appears so far to be limited to two areas north of the Bay Bridge, officials note, which together account for just 2 percent of the state's overall oyster harvest. Reporting preliminary results from a continuing baywide survey, the Department of Natural Resources said biologists recently found three-fourths or more of the oysters dead on bars between the mouth of the Patapsco and Magothy rivers and across the bay in an area north of Rock Hall.

WASHINGTON -- The quaint practice of pricing stocks by halves, quarters, eighths or sixteenths is likely to disappear soon, Wall Street movers and shakers told Congress last week.But the heads of major U.S. stock and security corporations said they don't want Washington telling them when to make a switch to decimal pricing -- a move proposed in pending legislation."Given the unparalleled success of our market, we ask that Congress not mandate changes without clear evidence," William Johnston, president of the New York Stock Exchange, told a House Commerce subcommittee.

WASHINGTON -- The quaint practice of pricing stocks by halves, quarters, eighths or sixteenths is likely to disappear soon, Wall Street movers and shakers told Congress last week.But the heads of major U.S. stock and security corporations said they don't want Washington telling them when to make a switch to decimal pricing -- a move proposed in pending legislation."Given the unparalleled success of our market, we ask that Congress not mandate changes without clear evidence," William Johnston, president of the New York Stock Exchange, told a House Commerce subcommittee.

In this "new economy" era, exemplified by computers, globalization and precision, the cornerstone of the U. S. financial system -- the stock market -- still relies on an inexact measurement system dating to the Spanish conquistadors. They used the system known as fractions. Professional investors don't much mind having stock prices quoted in eighths and sixteenths of a dollar, viewing fractions as a kind of secret knowledge that separates the in-the-trenches traders from the investing masses.

Because of a computer error, fractions were dropped from an article on the 25th anniversary of Secretariat's Triple Crown in Saturday's editions. The colt won the Kentucky Derby and the Preakness by 2 1/2 lengths, and he won the Belmont in world-record time for 1 1/2 miles.The Sun regrets the errors.Pub Date: 5/12/98

Beginning in the Wednesday, May 31, editions of The Sun, stock prices in the listings for the New York, Nasdaq and American stock exchanges, as well as those in the Sun Stocks, will appear in decimals rather than fractions. A recent listing for Legg Mason Inc., for example, would read 41.9375, down .5625, instead of 41 15/16, down 9/16. The change, which was approved by the New York Stock Exchange in June 1997, means that the spreads -- the difference between prices that investors can get when selling a stock and the price that brokers will charge them to buy it -- are likely to narrow.

At these Olympic games, the athletes wear jeans, opening ceremonies consist of a whistle blow and medals are creatively fashioned from construction paper.About 150 eighth-graders at Elkridge Landing Middle School participated in nine Math Olympics events Friday. They calculated scoring percentages after shooting basketballs, formed geometric shapes with giant rubber bands and converted softball throws to yards and meters."This is cool," said eighth-grader Tyler Drewes, figuring out how long it would take him to run a mile based on his 300-yard time of 54 seconds.

Investment company T. Rowe Price has invested $461.3 million across several mutual funds in Facebook, Twitter and other social media companies, according to regulatory filings. The investments make up only a small fraction — less than 1 percent — of each fund's portfolio, but show the growing interest by investors to buy a stake in social media companies poised to eventually initiate a public offering. Price had $482 billion in assets under management at the end of last year.

On October 16, 2009, JOSEPH FRACTION, devoted uncle, cousin and friend. Friends may visit the FAMILY OWNED MARCH FUNERAL HOME WEST, INC., 4300 Wabash Avenue, on Monday after 8:30 A.M., where the family will receive friends on Tuesday at 11:30 A.M. follow by funeral service at 12 noon.

Maryland's second-highest court resolves hundreds of disputes a year - on issues ranging from whether companies really have to pay millions to wronged customers or whether a convicted murderer deserves a new trial. But the resolution of those cases is not usually made widely available to the public. Nine out of every 10 opinions from the Court of Special Appeals are labeled "unreported," virtually closed off from public scrutiny and never bound in legal volumes. Google and more powerful legal search engines won't turn up the opinions either - even when the name of a company or defendant is instantly recognizable.

Late in 2005, retired Rouse Co. CEO Anthony W. Deering and his wife, Lynn, donated half-interest in a Winslow Homer painting to the Baltimore Museum of Art. But the 1873 oil - Young Man Reading - has spent only a month at the museum and wasn't on display. That's fine with the BMA, which says it must prepare a proper exhibition before showing the piece and will inherit the whole thing anyway when the Deerings die, at the latest. But this kind of thing really hacks off Iowa Sen. Charles E. Grassley, and he has a point.

For class with a capital "C," few restaurants in town can top the 26-year-old Brass Elephant, located in a gorgeous 19th-century Mount Vernon townhouse. But two people can easily spend a c-note or more eating there. The solution, for those who want a snazzy atmosphere and delicious food but don't want to spend quite as much money, is the Tusk Lounge, the bar and restaurant on the restaurant's top floor. This is the place for those times you want to eat like a grown-up but pay kid-sized prices.

It's sometimes said that everyone has a double. But what if you found out you also had a triple, or a quadruple? Or, for that matter, what if there were 20 of you? These are among the questions raised by British playwright Caryl Churchill's elliptical drama A Number, receiving its Baltimore premiere at Everyman Theatre. In A Number, a grown son discovers that he has at least 20 clones. Then he discovers that he is a clone -- that his father had his original son cloned, then raised the clone instead.

With so much brainpower on Wall Street, changing the pricing of stocks from fractions to the more customer-friendly decimals should be, well, a no-brainer. But the U.S. securities industry has been jawboning about reporting stock prices in dollars and cents rather than fractions for about four years now, and yet nothing has changed. In the latest development, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission said in June that the major stock markets have until April 9 to price stocks in dollars and cents instead of fractions.

AN ENCOUNTER on Charles Street in the city they call Baltimore, as related by a friend: "Older guy, dressed like a down-and-outer, comes up to me the other day near Louie's Bookstore. I braced for the pitch, figuring he was panhandler."Instead, he asks if I can help him with an algebra problem for his son. He then shows me a problem -- math, not algebra. It was a problem involving fractions: 4-3/5 plus 5 1/2. He said he knew you could do it two ways, by cross-multiplying the fractions to get a common denominator, or by using decimal numbers (4.6 plus 5.5)

Scientists examining the oldest light in the universe say they've found clear evidence that matter expanded at an almost inconceivable rate after the big bang, creating conditions that led to the formation of the first stars. Light from the big bang's afterglow shows that the universe grew from the size of a marble to an astronomical size in just a trillionth of a second after its birth 13.7 billion years ago, researchers from Johns Hopkins and Princeton universities say. Readings from a NASA probe also show that the earliest stars formed about 400 million years after the big bang - not 200 million years afterward, as the research team once thought.

Designer handbags are, hands down, the hottest thing going this year. Problem is, who can afford to buy them since they can cost as much as your rent or house payment? There are, however, two innovative online companies that can help. By renting designer purses for a fraction of the cost of buying them, Bag Borrow or Steal and From Bags to Riches are making it possible for frugal fashionistas to have their handbags and their paychecks, too. "I don't think a day goes by that there isn't an e-mail where people say, `Thank you for being here!