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The upsurge in merger developments in recent years is an area of tremendous interest to American businessmen. Two or three years ago, few people knew much about mergers. My company, D. H. Blair Securities Corporation, felt it important to become an information source and thus began to sponsor seminars around the country. We found a tremendous interest in the merger movement but that few people knew much even of a general nature about mergers. During the past two years, however, the public has become fairly knowledgeable about mer gers because the financial pages of most newspapers and magazines are filled with merger activities.In 1969 about 1,700 mergers were completed versus around 1,800 for 1968. The current trend is down because the stock market is down, cash is scarce -the two main routes to mergers -and because of new governmental regulations. Yet far more mergers than those actually completed during 1969 were announced in the news.The reason for the proliferation of announcements is that not only are there more prospective mergers, but most people contemplating a merger are scared to death of the new disclosure rules.These specify in essence that when anything happens in a company that is liable to affect the price of its stock and this information becomes known to outsiders, then the company must publicly disclose the information.Consider the cases of Texas Gulf Sulphur and of Merrill-Lynch in which the critical problem was that insiders had information not available to the public. In the Texas Gulf case, the information was of dramatic importance as high officials of the company were trading in company stock and were privy to the company's discovery of valuable ore in the Timmons area of Ontario, information which the public didn't have and which substantially affected stock valueIn the Merrill-Lynch case, some company insiders knew the crucial figures concerning Douglas Aircraft because Merrill-Lynch and their bankers s were involved in an underwriting of Douglas' securities at that time. This case introduced a new term to Wall Street -the &dquo;tippertippe&dquo; concept which means that if you are engaged in securities market and know certain inside information or even hear of it you'd better not act upon it without first telling everybody.