The 2023–2024 rate hikes and bear market wipeouts tamped down rampant retail speculation. But in 2025, rate cut expectations, along with AI-inspired price rebounds year to date, have reignited animal spirits.

ChatGPT astutely observes that “Day trading’s resurgence may also reflect disillusionment with traditional investing timelines and frustration with affordability/inflation.”  In other words, the masses are struggling, and those with little to lose are often attracted to gambling. See, New Class of Meme Stocks:

Individual investors are once again loading up on a group of unloved stocks and taking to social media to defend them from the haters and the short sellers.

Meet the cast of the meme-stock craze, season two.

“Let’s goo!!” a user named Hot-Ticket9440 wrote on a subreddit forum Tuesday as shares of Kohl’s, the department-store chain, surged by nearly 40%. “Max pain on the shorts buy every dip. Together we strong.”

“$OPEN has GameStop vibes written all over it,” Skip Tradeless wrote Tuesday on X of Opendoor Technologies , the real-estate platform. “WE WON’T STOP UNTIL $82!”

Shares of Kohl’s and Opendoor have rocketed higher recently. So have other oddball stocks, including QuantumScape , a maker of batteries for electric vehicles, and Rigetti Computing , a quantum-computing firm.

Their recent rise—and the cult followings they have inspired on social media—are reminiscent of GameStop, AMC Entertainment and the original meme stocks that caught fire in the aftermath of the pandemic, when interest rates were near zero and the market’s rally was underway. Younger individual investors congregated on online stock-picking forums to share their triumphs and losses, and found a common enemy in the professional investors who were betting against their favorite stocks.

Now, with stocks at record [highs], the economy staying resilient and corporate earnings beating expectations, the environment is ripe for investors to speculate once again, some analysts say.

“You see all these indications where this is full-blown meme mania,” said Brent Kochuba, founder of derivatives-data firm SpotGamma.

Of course, it’s not just meme-bros going for broke here. The busted and desperate are gambling alongside the life savings of 30% of the population in the 55+ age group, who own some 79% of now grossly inflated stocks and equity funds (Deutsche Bank Research)—US market cap to GDP shown below since 1970, courtesy of Gurufocus.com.

In keeping with the timeless truth that the public buys most at the top, Canadians who were all in on the real estate bubble in 2019-2022 are now piling into the stock market; see Canadians Pull Back on Real Estate, Set Record Investment in US Stocks.

Thanks to weakness in the greenback, US stocks are about flat year-to-date for Canadian investors.

Canada’s stock market is looking bubblicious too.

When speculative bubbles burst, like in 2000, 2008 and 2022, everyone at the table gets taken out on stretchers. Crazy is as crazy does. Those who cannot afford to lose heavily and spend years trying to grow back losses are wise to resist the madness of crowds.