Only comparable to the time just before the Great Depression...

Penny stock trading rose 20 times in the past year. Here is a publication from the New York Times: Penny Stocks Are Booming, Which Is Good News for Swindlers with a contrary warning that everyone should be aware of.  Excerpt:

Penny stocks – the name given to more than 10,000 tiny companies like SpectraScience (SCIE)– have been around forever, but they're booming as small investors flood the market. And this time around, social media is fueling the craze. Whether traded to fend off the boredom of pandemic living or to turn a quick profit, these dirt-cheap but risky shares are another frontier in a world where meme stocks like GameStop gained overnight stardom, Dogecoin morphed from a joke cryptocurrency to a hot investment and a digital artwork known as an NFT sold for $69 million.

It's part of a "massive surge" in retail trading reminiscent of the 1920s, when amateurs flooded into the stock market before the 1929 crash, said Tyler Gellasch, a former Securities and Exchange Commission official who leads the nonprofit Healthy Markets Association.

"The only relevant historical precedent seems to increasingly be the days before the Great Depression," he said.

Penny stocks occupy a low-rent district of Wall Street, a world rife with fraud and chicanery where companies that don't have a viable product, or are mired in debt, often sell their shares. Traded on the lightly regulated over-the-counter, or O.T.C., markets, penny stocks face fewer rules about publishing information on financial results or independent board members. Wall Street analysts don't usually follow them. Major investors don't buy them.

But last month, there were 1.9 trillion transactions on O.T.C. markets, an increase of more than 2,000 percent from a year earlier, according to data from the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, a self-regulatory group that oversees brokerage firms.

The lack of oversight makes penny stocks easy targets for scammers, which has long accounted for their unsavory reputation. But risk can also be a draw for thrill seekers or those who fear they've missed a market boom that is creating wealth all around them.

I think the market is fooling us into an illusionary scheme of  becoming-rich-quick-via-trading with the ultimate top forming in trying to punish most people the most in the months ahead. Sure we are not at the danger of a new Great Depression any time soon but I think we are getting closer and closer with increasing frenzy market behaviors by all kinds of FOMOs in nearly everything. The ending won't be pretty, folks😨 and a lot of people will be in tears gravely 😭