WILL WE CALL ‘EM NIGHT TRADERS NOW?

Night-owl trading sooner rather than later, in the here and now rather than in the sweet by-and-by — maybe not too long after the Fourth of July and certainly by shortly after Labor Day. But never on Friday.

The National Association of Securities Dealers thumbs-upped a plan to trade Nasdaq’s top 100 non-financial stocks in a session running from 5: 30 p.m. to 9 or 10. Regulatory and industry approvals would delay the start of trading until September, said Frank Zarb, chief exec of the association.

His hand had been forced by New York Stock Exchange chairman Richard Grasso, who earlier announced that he is squeezing by a year the schedule for a late session on the Big Board. He said it was possible that cocktail-time trading, starting at 5 or 6 p.m., and ending at 9 or 10, could start as soon as July.

Pressure from after-hours traders, led by Reuters Group PLC’s Instinet and Island ECN Inc., he said, “made it very clear that that timetable had to be accelerated.”

Hold the chatter

If the guy behind the counter at the deli or the dude slapping the dough for your pizza gives you a hot tip, better not listen. Two of the 25 defendants in the Securities and Exchange Commission insider trading suit involving International Business Machines Corp.’s purchase of Lotus Development Corp. were just guys behind the counter who passed on tips from an IBM secretary’s husband, the SEC says, and before they knew it (some didn’t even have brokerage accounts), the 25 had made $1.3 million.

Never mind

Your friends at the kinder and gentler Internal Revenue Service have decided to read their own regulations and officially extend the deadline until Oct. 15 for people who converted to a Roth individual retirement account and then discovered they were ineligible. For the conversion to be kosher, your adjusted gross income must be under $100,000 and married people can’t file separate returns.

The catch is that you must have filed your 1998 return on time. You have until April 15, 2002, to file an amended return.

Seoul power

On the emerging markets front, Goldman Sachs Group Inc. agreed to put $500 million into Kookmin Bank, South Korea’s second-largest. That would make it the biggest shareholder, with one-sixth. HSBC Holdings PLC plans to buy 70% of Koreabank for $700 million, too. Somebody smells a bargain.

Slimming diet

This time Cendant Corp. really means it when it says it has recovered from the big bang accounting it discovered last year after it was created in the fusion of HFS Inc. and CUC International.

Off came its fleet rental and management unit like last year’s bathing suit. Avis Rent A Car picked it up for $5 billion in cash, convertibles (stock, not cars) and debt. Next out of the Cendant closet will be its publishing, billboard and credit arms.

That would leave it with Howard Johnson motels, Century 21 real estate offices and its direct marketing and car rental business, including about a third of perennial No. 2 Avis.

Both eyes, please

Speaking of bean counters, Coopers & Lybrand, now merged into PricewaterhouseCoopers, agreed to pay $108 million, without admitting or denying wrongdoing, to untangle itself from the collapsed web of press non-lord Robert Maxwell, who, you recall, was found floating like an oil drum near his yacht in the mid-Atlantic eight years ago.

Company administrators sued the accountants for $160 million on grounds that they had noticed nothing amiss as Mr. Maxwell spun money like a roulette wheel between his London and New York operations in an attempt to keep ahead of the repo man.