SECURITIES: The New Pacific Exchange

For more than 50 years the Los Angeles and San Francisco Stock Exchanges have operated independently of each other—sometimes with a loss of business for both. A Los Angeles broker who wanted to sell stock, for example, often could find no buyers, though there might be dozens in San Francisco. This week, with the Securities and Exchange Commission's approval, the two West Coast exchanges joined together as the Pacific Coast Stock Exchange. In 1956 the combined total of the number of shares traded in both exchanges exceeded 38,000,000, making the Pacific Coast...