AI super rally has retail investors acting the most aggressive since trading frenzy during Covid

A trader works on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) during the opening bell in New York, on May 11, 2026. Angela Weiss | Afp | It's official: traders haven't been this aggressively bullish since they were stuck at home with stimulus checks betting on a bounce-back in the global economy. Retail traders are buying calls in Cboe's "Mag 10" stocks – the big seven plus AMD , Palantir and Broadcom – at the heaviest 10-day clip since 2021, according to a report from the exchange. Of new positions opened, 52% were call-buying, and 17% were call–selling. "Hedgers have thrown in the towel," Mandy Xu, head of derivatives market intelligence for Cboe, said in a call. "It's a consistent theme we're seeing, with people trying to catch up to the market rally through buying calls." It's a sharp about-face from just a month ago when Cboe's call-buying metric was 15 points lower and investors were preoccupied by geopolitics and crude oil prices. The pick-up in optimism matches other data characterizing speculative appetite amid this year's extraordinary surge in tech stocks. The price of call contracts on the Nasdaq-100 index that are one standard deviation out of the money is at a 52-week high and close to a three-year record, according to Nations Indexes' 30-day CallDex Index. "The story is not just that Nasdaq-100 calls are pricey, but that nobody seems interested in selling covered calls," said Nations Indexes president Scott Nations. …