NEW YORK: The retail investing crowd is back in the throes of a meme stock mania as encouraging messaging from the Federal Reserve (Fed), GameStop Corp’s expected earnings and sky-high stock prices ignite a euphoria among day traders.

Individual investors’ piece of options volume has ticked higher as traders buy calls to position for continued rallies in already frothy equity indexes.

They snapped up shares of Reddit Inc after its scorching initial public offering last week while also pumping up old classics, sparking a 15% surge in GameStop shares on Monday and rocketing bitcoin towards fresh highs.

“A proper comparison would be the summer of 2021,” said Vincent Deluard, StoneX’s director of global macro strategy.

“With last week’s extremely dovish Fed meeting, we had the all-clear signal, and that was the cherry on top.”

Institutional traders aren’t exactly on pause with the S&P 500 Index, hitting 20 new highs in three months this year.

But demand for put options ticked up modestly from a month ago as technical strategists grow increasingly skeptical of further gains in stocks.