  We have searched the Forth Catalogue of Nearby Stars for halo stars and
identified 15 subdwarfs and a high velocity white dwarf in the solar
neighbourhood. This search was motivated mainly by the recent determinations of
MACHO masses of about 0.5 M_sun, which are typical for halo dwarfs. The local
mass density of the stars is 1.5 10^{-4} M_sun pc^{-3}, which is only 3% of the
current estimate of the local mass density of the MACHO population. We compare
the local density of subdwarfs with constraints set by HST observations of
distant red dwarfs. Using models of the stellar halo with density laws that
fall off like r^{-\alpha}, \alpha = 3.5 to 4, we find that the HST constraints
can only be matched, if we assume that the stellar halo is flattened with an
axial ratio of about 0.6. The non-detection of the analogues of MACHOs in the
solar neighbourhood allows to set an upper limit to the luminosity of MACHOs of
M_B > 21 magnitudes.
