Consolidation comes in many forms… Buying up assets or operations, buying stakes in operations or companies, merging operations, takeovers, the list goes on and on.

But one thing that has started gaining interest in the mainstream media is exchange consolidation.

Remember last summer when the Chicago Merchantile Exchange bought the Chicago Board of Trade? Or when the Group decided to by Nymex the following March for $11 billion? Or when NYSE Euronext bid for AMEX? When Nasdaq wanted to buy London and the OMX?

These merging markets offer considerable cost savings, a uniform platform, and an ease of cross-transactions that could ultimately create a “flat world” of international trading.

This behavior is starting to trickle into emerging markets as regional stock exchanges gain market capitalization and foreign interest. For example, Wiener Börse, operator of the Vienna stock market, just announced that it would buy the majority stake in the Prague Stock Exchange.

The deal is worth about $264 million, and Wiener Börse beat out other regional rivals, like Deutsche Boerse and the OMX Nordic Exchange. The Warsaw Exchange, Wiener Börse’s main competitor, was kept out of the bidding process because it’s a state-owned business.

But this isn’t the first market Vienna’s gotten its paws on…

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These are the days when four-letter words buzz like flies on a corpse.

I spent this morning in a meeting with my fellow analysts to discuss what the next best investment opportunity will be.

I have to say, the mood was positively dismal once we heard the Dow dropped below 10,000. The buzz still hasn’t died, and I know some of my colleagues are still frantically sending messages on their Blackberries.

Yes, folks, it’s another record down day here in the U.S.

You can gawk, you can cry, you can yell and scream…

Or you can grab risk by the horns and snap up some really great deals. It’ll mean finding those obscure markets, or those beaten so severely that shares are selling well below the value of the company.

And that means that you can make some serious money down the road.

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Two countries, three trains, two trams, and two buses later and I’ve arrived at my final destination on this tour: Budapest.

From the tiny town of Tatranska Lomnica, I made my way to Bratislava, the capital of Slovakia. It’s not the best place for photos, though there are several palaces that are camera worthy, and the main square, which is surrounded by embassies, is a nice place to start your shopping.

Bratislava is fairly cosmopolitan, though. There are plenty of international businesses, like Ernst and Young (Private). It’s also home to the stock exchange, the BSSE.

And, like Krakow, there’s a lot of construction going on. As I told you last time, growth has not been checked so you’ve got unusual buildings thrown up side by side with historical sites. Take a look at the panoramic photo of the city.

Lots of concrete…

And cranes.

The city has quite a ways to go, though, but it’s getting a lot of influence from its surrounding countries. Bratislava is a mere three hours from Vienna, and is right on the border with the Czech Republic, too. It’s also 200 kilometers (124 miles) from Budapest, which is by far the largest city on my trip.

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In my last post, I noted that Krakow was “under construction.” Well, I’d like to extend that to more than just the city. There was barely a road I travelled on that wasn’t coned off and rerouted for some kind of improvement.

And one of the reasons Poland is spending so much time updating its infrastructure and roads is to become more attractive to foreign investors.

On one stretch of highway, I saw two major manufacturing plants: BASF (BAS:Frankfurt) and Daewoo (004550:Korea).

Interestingly, the Slovak roads are in much better condition. Investment is still going strong, though, and one major private investor is expanding a huge resort here in the High Tatras, in the Pieniny National Park.

Now, that brings up an interesting point to growing so quickly…

And sometimes, fast growth comes at the cost of quality. Take this picture of the Czorsztyn-Niedzica-Sromowce Complex for example. This is the dam provides only half the electricity it could have had it been built right. It was finished in 1994 and has a capacity of 160 million kWh of generation a year. That’s less than what Rhode Island uses in a month… 

So, not all the rules are being followed. Even my guide book has a little note on it. In talking about Slovakia’s capital, Bratislava, the Lonely Planet says:

As post-EU-membership investment pours in, the whir of construction equipment in all quarters of Slovakia’s capital is growing… There’s something a bit reckless about the development, though. Zoning laws are largely ignored and and odd mix of antireform-minded parties took control of the parliament in June 2006.

But Slovakia is certainly breaking away from the past, and it’s financial markets are trying to do the same. The SAX Index on the Bratislava Stock Exchange (BSSE) has climbed 3.54% in August, year over year.

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