Give an overview of the global securities markets and their structural trends.

The world's map (by name, the exam's tour): the US markets (the NYSE-and-Nasdaq duopoly — the depth-and-liquidity benchmark), Europe's (the LSE, Euronext, Deutsche Boerse — the consolidated-exchange era), Asia's giants (Tokyo, Hong Kong, Shanghai-Shenzhen, Singapore — the listing-scale races), the emerging markets (India's NSE-BSE scale-and-digitisation — the UPI- era retail wonder; the ASEAN-and-Gulf exchanges), and the bond-and-derivatives layers (the global fixed-income-and-OTC-derivatives markets — the ISDA world). The structural trends: the demutualization-and-listing of the exchanges themselves (Nepal's own path's context — Unit 2.8), the consolidation (the mergers-of-exchanges era), the technology's arms-race (the algo-and-low- latency world), and the retail democratisation's waves.