An independent committee has been set up to finalise the index in a months time. ``We have set up a committee which is working on making an index for the Inter-connected Stock Exchange.

The committee is looking at a numerous parameters that would go into making the index like, the market capitalisation of the companies, the industries to be represented in the index, the liquidity of the companies, the weightage, among other criterion. The committee will make an independent index and we are not employing the services of any outside agency,'' said the managing director of ISE, JosephMassey.

Massey said that the index would try and ensure to have an adequate and balanced representation of industries and companies. ``There are 100-150 scrips which have the highest market capitalisation and we would be looking at this universe of scrips. The index would definitely include infotech stocks,'' said Massey.

The ISE-index will represent the national character of the exchange and will try to represent heavyweight stocks in each of the regional stock exchanges who have joined the ISE. Besides, the market capitalisation factor the exchange would also consider using some scrips which do not qualify in market capitalisation criteria but are heavily traded in their respective regional exchanges.

Assessing the `impact cost' structure of the index is high on the agenda of the exchange. The impact cost of each stock generally measures the liquidity of the stock. Lower the impact cost lesser is the volatility in the scrip. ISE is planning to build an index which is not highly volatile. The ISE isstarting mock-trading sessions from November 22 which will be carried in a phased manner. ``The trading requires training for brokers which would get completed by December 3. So, we will have 11 exchanges by December 3 who would be going for mock-trading with the exchange going live by December end,'' said Massey.

ISE is also marketing itself to financial institutions (FIs), banks's subsidiaries and leading foreign institutional investors (FIIs) to join the bourse as a dealer.

The idea of marketing the concept is to reach out to retail investors. Broking outfits of FIs, FII brokerage houses and bank subsidiaries are generally members with major stock exchanges in the country like the Bombay Stock Exchange (BSE) and National Stock Exchange (NSE). By joining ISE, they will have access to a large investor base all over the country and also trade on a number of stocks listed only on the regional bourses.

The exchange has developed a two-tired structure system for traders and dealers where the financialinstitutions will be eligible to be traders and brokers at the regional stock exchanges are appointed as dealers.