the Bermuda Stock Exchange within a few months, Exchange chairman Mr. Bill Dolan said yesterday.

Draft membership rules have already been drawn up and are due to be submitted before the Bermuda Monetary Authority later this week for approval.

Mr. Dolan would not give specific details on the membership requirements until they have been approved, but he said: "The cost of membership will not be prohibitive.'' He added: "I believe there is the potential for another half a dozen local members of the Exchange.'' Foreign-owned members may also be allowed to join for the purposes of trading stocks of international companies listed on the Exchange, he said.

Just five international companies now have listings but Mr. Dolan said new rules are currently being drawn up to encourage more overseas firms, and subsequently foreign-owned securities dealers, to join the Exchange.

"I'm looking for membership rules which will be flexible and attractive so that we can attract international businesses,'' he said. "If the rules are attractive enough then there's no reason why companies of the calibre of Jardine Matheson, for example, should not be listed. There are opportunities for substantial growth for the Bermuda Stock Exchange.'' He added: "It's my personal agenda that we have the membership rules and listings rules in place before I step down as chairman at the end of the year.'' Before major growth can take place, though, he recognised the current clearing system, in which transfers of share certificates can take up to four to six weeks to take place, needs to be "thoroughly overhauled''.

"In a year or two we should be able to have a scriptless clearing system in place in Bermuda,'' he said. "People would hold their position in book stock and there would be no physical delivery of share certificates. That would take away a lot of unnecessary paperwork.

"All a shareholder would receive is a small notification saying that the trade had been exacted. Of course, they would continue to receive annual reports and so on.'' If volume on the Exchange continues to increase due to the proposed changes, Mr. Dolan said the opening hours of the Exchange, currently from 9.30 a.m. to 10.30 a.m., can be extended, if necessary, for any time period up to 24 hours-a-day.

Share and bond volume on the Exchange has taken off since daily trading was introduced on February 24 of this year, he said.

During the first four months of calendar 1993, $11.2 million worth of trades were carried out on the Exchange, compared with $5.7 million for the same period in 1993 -- an increase of almost 100 percent.

A further $8.7 million worth of trades were carried out over May and June, including a controversial, single $3 million Bank of Bermuda share transaction, bringing the total value of trading for the first six months of 1993 to $19.9 million -- an all-time half-year record.

"Some people have made criticisms that changes on the Exchange are taking place too slowly but that is unfair,'' said Mr. Dolan, who first suggested daily trading back in 1988 when he did his first stint as chairman of the Exchange. "There's something new happening all the time.

"We went daily in February, we had the incorporation of the Exchange in April, and Greg Wojciechowski joined as project manager on May 11.

"Some people feel that changes have not been fast enough but we had a previous system that worked extremely well for over 23 years. I'm not defending the way that system was set up with the open-cry method and the settlement and clearing arrangements that were in place. But no-one lost any money during those 23 years. People overlook that.'' Adding that the new computer system was working "very efficiently'', he said: "I would have hated to be the guy who had to go back to the ping pong balls because his new system never worked out.''