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On the Night Shift. Most Wall Street firms have abandoned their traditional 9-to-5 day, working clerical staffs overtime and Saturdays, often hiring night shifts to help with the load. Even with newly instituted training programs, brokers complain that they cannot find enough qualified help, though able receiving and billing clerks often earn $200 a week. "Clerical workers no longer apply for a job," says Vice President Charles Rosenthal of L. M. Rosenthal & Co. "They come over for coffee and doughnuts and discuss their careers."
Responding to strongly worded advice from President Robert W. Haack of the N.Y.S.E., several brokerage firms have begun taking direct action to cool the speculative fervor. E. F. Hutton & Co. announced that it will forbid its salesmen to solicit orders to buy stocks selling for less than $5 a share and will allow them no commission on such orders. Merrill Lynch, Pierce, Fenner & Smith, the nation's largest securities concern, said it plans to increase restrictions on margin accounts.
Belated Computers. Such strictures represent a considerable change of thinking in an industry long attuned to stressing sales above everything else. It was 1952 before the tradition-minded Big Board finally gave up Saturday trading—and it did so then in part because brokerage firms were having trouble finding people willing to work a six-day week. Now lack of machines is an equally vexing problem—Wall Street's tardiness in mechanizing its back-office operations is a fundamental cause of its prosperous predicament.
Last month the N.Y.S.E. belatedly began a computer-run Central Certificate Service, which will do away with the physical transfer of stock certificates held in brokers' names. These account for 75% of Big Board trading, but it will be next year before all N.Y.S.E. stocks are in the computer, and 1970 or later before the system takes in the snarled over-the-counter market. In the meantime, the prospect is that the stock markets will continue to be plagued by paperwork.