SHORT INTERESTS: TIPS, TRENDS, OBSERVATIONS

Lites out

The Associate Certified Financial Planner designation — CFP Lite, as its detractors call it — is officially dead. The board of governors of the Certified Financial Planner Board of Standards in Denver has withdrawn the applications it filed last spring for trademarks for the terms “Associate CFP” and “CFP Associate.” Many CFPs disliked the idea and a majority of the more than 900 licensees who responded to the board’s survey on the issue opposed the designation. Planners said they believed it would weaken the stature of the certified financial planner designation and confuse the public about what the initials “CFP” stand for.

The board’s chairman, Harold Evensky, apologized: “We deserved the licensee reaction we received.” He said the board is now committed to involving licensees more in policy decisions.

Rat out

Those Dow Jones & Co. workers are awfully pushy. The 2,400 of them who belong to Local 1096 of the Independent Association of Publisher’s Employees, including reporters and editors at the Wall Street Journal, say they smell a rat in what the company has in mind for their retirement plan. Workers at the publisher’s New York headquarters contented themselves with marching around the building, making the usual noise.

That wasn’t enough for the 900 suburbanites who work at the company’s biggest plant in South Brunswick Township, N.J. The day before contract negotiations resumed, the workers inflated a 30-foot red-eyed rat balloon next to the Dow complex on busy U.S. Route 1.

Travelers were amused; the company was unfazed; the union said it would keep up the pressure. The company wants to end its 15%-of-salary profit sharing contribution to the workers’ pension plan and substitute an 11% benefit, part of which is a 401(k) program match.

“The move to cut retirement benefits is just plain ridiculous, especially when the company is doing so well,” says Ron Chen, local president.

Investors might disagree. Dow’s stock, at $55, is up only a little over 100% from its close of Oct. 12, 1987. If Dow’s best-known average had just kept pace, it would currently be around 5000.

Crapping out

The New York Stock Exchange rolled the dice against the house in federal district court in Manhattan and lost. Senior Judge Miriam Cedarbaum dismissed the Big Board’s trademark infringement case against Las Vegas casino hotel New York New York with the judicial equivalent of “fuggedaboudit.”

It seems that the hotel has a fake Manhattan skyline and even a financial district with a casino players club that lurks behind the pillared facade of something called the New York $lot Exchange. Big Board lawyers huffed that this was false advertising and unfair competition with the “image of dependability, quality, regulation and prestige the exchange has striven to maintain.”

Her honor pointed out that consumers might be more confused “if the casino sold frankfurters under the name ‘Nathan’s Slot Dogs.’

Judge Cedarbaum allowed that indeed there are “similarities between gambling and investing in securities. Nevertheless the casino and the NYSE do not compete directly, and they offer different services.”

On the other hand, stock exchange listees might take a lesson from the $lot exchange motto: “Where dividends are paid daily.”