December 1, 1991

He enters with a raised fist and departs blowing kisses, and as long as he is on the tennis court, the stadium is no longer an inanimate object: the bleachers roar, the glass doors steam over and a fever pitch prevails. Henri Leconte, the curse of Paris after his 1988 French Open surrender to Mats Wilander, is currently the lion of Lyons.

A CHICKEN that crosses the road to eat cabbage will produce eggs with less cholesterol. That conclusion follows four years of research by Alice Havens, a 19-year-old student at the University of Connecticut in Storrs. The Federal Government recently granted Ms. Havens a patent for her chicken feed based on dehydrated cabbage. She says it can lower the eggs' cholesterol content by as much as 30 percent. What started out as a 10th-grade science project may end up affecting the diet of people around the world. But the young inventor remains modest. "If my product can help people with high cholesterol levels, I'm glad," Ms. Havens said.

In a scene reminiscent of the giddy buying sprees that characterized some home sales during the 1980's, all 102 residences in a yet-to-be-built community in Wall Township, N.J., were sold out in six hours during a blueprint preview on Nov. 23. "We have not had a sellout like this since 1988," said Ara Hovnanian, president of K. Hovnanian Companies of Red Bank, N.J., developer of the complex. "I think this shows that there is no slack in the demand for reasonably priced housing."

Betting people in the real estate community here think the odds are excellent that riverboat gambling, approved by the State Legislature in July, will spur development along the Mississippi River waterfront downtown. The law stipulated that construction of the boats could not begin until January 1992, and the first boats are not expected to begin operating until late in 1993. Nevertheless, real estate brokers and developers already have begun to prepare for what they think will be a daily influx of thousands of visitors.

When a customer has no effective choice, profit margins go up. When choices arrive, those margins can suffer. Last week brought big writeoffs at Philip Morris and I.B.M., both companies that seem to have been slow to recognize changes in their markets that were inevitably going to slash margins.