February 27, 1986

As an Israeli paratroop commander, Aryeh Finegold never lost a man in battle. But as president and chief executive of the Daisy Systems Corporation, he just lost 100. Daisy, the high-flying Silicon Valley company, laid off 100 workers, or 10 percent of its work force, on Tuesday and said it would report a ''significant loss'' for the quarter ending March 31. The announcement stunned Wall Street. Daisy's stock, traded over-the-counter, plunged $4, to $11.75, today, and has now lost two-thirds of its value since December, when it was selling around $31. The announcement of a quarterly loss was particularly surprising to analysts because as recently as two months ago, Daisy could do no wrong.

ANYONE who has ever ventured into a showroom selling decorative fabrics knows that the price of a few yards of goods can soar to hundreds of dollars. There are, however, stores where shoppers can find a wide range of such fabrics from top manufacturers at surprisingly modest prices. For example, a Schumacher cotton-rayon tapestry that sells for $30 to $50 a yard might cost $6 to $15. The reason for the variety of stocks is based on the complicated mechanics of the decorative-fabric business. Most fabric showrooms are open only to decorators and designers. There, the best-selling fabrics and staples are usually carried as open stock, but many of the goods displayed are made as samples only; actual yardage may not be produced until ordered by a decorator. Since the costs are high in manufacturing just one order, additional yardage will be made, which then may or may not be sold. Enter the discount fabric operations that buy up the manufacturers' overstocks.

An obituary on Tuesday of Louis Silberkleit, co-founder of Archie Comics Inc., misidentified his second wife, who survives him. She is the former Nicole Bernheim.

An article in Business Day yesterday about a credit agreement reached by Commodore International Ltd. overstated the company's loss and revenues in the year ended last June 30. It lost $113 million on sales of $883 million.

The bond market rally accelerated yesterday, as prices for long-term Treasury issues rose more than 2 points, and yields fell below 8 1/2 percent for the first time since October 1978. Analysts gave a variety of new and old explanations for the decline in bond yields, including the prospects for lower inflation this year, expected declines in Japanese and German interest rates, and strong demand by Japanese institutions. But for many traders and investors, the catalyst for buying bonds was a simple desire to participate in the huge profits being earned as bond prices rise and yields fall. At yesterday's closing price of 108 7/8, to yield 8.43 percent, the 9 1/4 percent Treasury bonds due in 2016 have gained 3 points this week, and about 9 3/8 points since Feb. 7, when the bellwether issue yielded about 9.3 percent.

President Reagan declared tonight that any cuts by Congress in his military spending proposal would threaten United States security and endanger any chance of improving relations with the Soviet Union. In a speech that marked the start of a campaign to urge Congress to support his military buildup, Mr. Reagan asserted that United States security was threatened by those who seek spending reductions and that a military imbalance exists between the United States and the Soviet Union. He said that the record of Soviet behavior pointed to the need to maintain his military buildup. Basis for Negotiations ''Strength is the most persuasive argument we have to convince our adversaries to negotiate seriously and to cease bullying other nations,'' Mr. Reagan said in remarks prepared for delivery tonight in a nationally televised speech. ''But tonight, the security program that you and I launched to restore America's strength is in jeopardy, threatened by those who would quit before the job is done.

An article in Metropolitan Report on Feb. 17 about a court battle over the estate of J. Seward Johnson, son of a Johnson & Johnson founder, included an erroneous description of a document being used by his widow to discredit family members seeking her husband's fortune.

It was devastating enough when Nina Shearer learned that her 3-year-old daughter - her only child - had AIDS. But Mrs. Shearer's trauma deepened as she and her daughter, Jackie, were gradually cut off from the world they had known. Mrs. Shearer gave up her job as a visiting lecturer in the design department at the University of California in Los Angeles last October and moved to New York so Jackie, who doctors say contracted AIDS through a blood transfusion, could be part of an experimental AIDS program at Children's Hospital in Newark. Mrs. Shearer's husband, from whom she was separated, stayed behind. She says her mother has stopped visiting. Her closest friends have become distant.

Frank Borman's 10-year tenure as chairman and chief executive of Eastern Airlines cannot be assessed simply. Some see his decisions and management style as leading the airline to its current crisis, which resulted early Monday in the grudging acceptance by its board of a takeover bid from the Texas Air Corporation. Others see Mr. Borman as a man caught by forces, unleashed by deregulation, that were largely beyond his control and who did better than one could have expected in guiding Eastern through one of the most tumultuous eras in aviation history. Effects of Deregulation ''Considering the hand that Eastern was dealt in 1979, I think Eastern has done phenomenally,'' Frank Lorenzo, the chairman of Texas Air, said yesterday in an interview. That year deregulation came into full force. Miami-based Eastern, with much of its route structure in the attractive East Coast markets, was the first major carrier to bear the brunt of the competition from People Express, Air Florida and other low-cost airlines that sprang up.

International Corazon C. Aquino appointed 17 Cabinet members, conferred with defeated rival politicians and held her first Presidential news conference. One day after Ferdinand E. Marcos fled the Presidental palace in an American helicopter - a day on which one of her advisers said she did not know if she would be arrested or killed - Mrs. Aquino moved quickly to put her Philippine Presidency into motion. [ Page A1, Column 6. ] The Aquino Cabinet is centrist on balance, according to political analysts in Manila. The general impression of 17 new appointees was that, with a few Marcos-backers, they were a blend of opposition politicians from years of costly resistance. [ A14:1. ]

Key middle-level space agency managers denied today that they had used ''harsh language'' or undue pressure to force a contractor to reverse a recommendation against launching the shuttle Challenger in cold weather Jan. 28. But members of a Presidential commission investigating the subsequent explosion of the craft, which killed seven astronauts, expressed skepticism about the explanations by officials from the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., of why the launching was permitted over objections of the contractor's engineers. And the commissioners forced Stanley Reinartz, manager of shuttle projects at Marshall, to acknowledge that he did not report the engineers' objections to superiors who had to make the final decision because finally officials from the contractor, Morton Thiokol Inc., and Marshall engineers agreed that the liftoff should proceed. It Was 'Normal Discussion' In tense and sometimes heated cross-examination of agency officials, the investigators are beginning to suggest that, given strong evidence of critical design flaws, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration should have decided much earlier to stop the shuttle flights. [ News analysis, page D27. ] In testimony today about the debate in the hours before the launching, several officials from Marshall said that they had simply challenged the engineers to analyze their data more rigorously in what amounted to a ''normal discussion'' among engineers, and that after the information was reconsidered, Thiokol's own management team concluded it was safe to launch.

Robert Penn Warren, the 80-year-old poet, novelist and essayist, was designated today as this country's first official Poet Laureate. Mr. Warren, whose most famous novel, ''All the King's Men,'' appeared 40 years ago, is the only writer to have won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction and for poetry (twice). A man of letters in the manner of another age, who has written in almost every literary form, he nevertheless said in 1983 that ''poetry is where my heart is,'' and he has devoted himself largely to poetry in the last decade. Britain has had a Poet Laureate since the 17th century; John Dryden was the first. Some of the official bards turned out inspired work, but others have been viewed by posterity as self-important hacks.