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There's nothing wrong with having retail participation in the markets.

Retail may see something that other people don't see.

And so I think it's probably not right to talk about this as if it's all just uninformed trading.

There are people who are thinking quite a bit about the trades they're making.

Hello and welcome to the Baron Streetwise Podcast. I'm Jack Howe.

The voice you just heard, that's Hester Perse.

She's a commissioner on the SEC, the Securities and Exchange Commission, America's regulator for financial markets.

We spoke recently about meme trading or frenzy gains in the prices of unlikely assets.

It looks to me like bubble type activity, but don't bubbles usually pop and then disappear for years?

This looks more like rolling outbreaks with some meme stocks going on multiple manic runs separated by mere months.

So how does it end or does it end?

Is it dangerous or just frivolous?

We'll hear from Commissioner Perse and from Brown University economist Mark Blythe.

I think of meme trading as bubbly activity and I think of bubbles as things that form and then pop and then go away.

That's what happened with the .com stock bubble just over 20 years ago and the bubble that formed during the roaring 1920s.

Technically less than a month after the crash of October 1929, stock started a huge six month rally.

But then that fizzled and in the end the Dow lost nearly 90% in less than three years and it didn't return to its former high until 1954.

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