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, 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 Corp., 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 under way. 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 records, 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.

Opendoor, which traded under $1 as recently as last week, began to take off after social-media users rallied around the company. Then, hedge-fund manager Eric Jackson said in a July 14 post on X that his firm EMJ Capital has taken a position in the stock. Opendoor notched six consecutive sessions of double-digit percentage gains following his endorsement, and the shares are up 439% in a month.

"You don't get 100-baggers without upset stomachs. But when you spot one early, with almost no one else watching -- that's when the magic happens, " wrote Jackson, using a slang term for a stock that increases by a factor of 100. "$OPEN is a bet we're willing to take."

Melvin Barrientos, a 38-year old educator in California, says he began scooping up shares of Opendoor last month when it was trading under $1 a share. He says he sold all his shares and put options tied to Opendoor over the past week and pocketed a roughly $3,000 profit. Put options confer the right to sell a stock at a set price.

Barrientos says he is always on the hunt for beaten-down stocks and has traded meme stocks like AMC and Carvana before, often loading up on thousands of shares before selling them when they rally. He says he plans to sell more Opendoor puts if the shares continue tumbling. Shares of Opendoor fell 10% to $2.88 on Tuesday.

"It just happens by luck," said Barrientos.

On Tuesday, investors turned their attention to another stock: Kohl's, the embattled retailer.

Kohl's revenue has been dropping for years as consumers gravitated to online shopping, and Wall Street has been betting against the company's shares, especially after the high-profile May firing of CEO Ashley Buchanan. Some Kohl's bonds are trading at steep discounts, a sign that debt investors have concerns about the company's long-term viability.

As of Monday, nearly half of the company's shares outstanding were sold short, according to FactSet, meaning a predominantly professional group of investors was betting the stock would decline.

Shares of Kohl's more than doubled at the open on Tuesday after the retailer was the subject of significant social-media attention overnight. They pared gains to close up 38% at $14.34 a share. A week ago, Kohl's was trading around $9.

Meme-stock traders often target companies that are highly shorted, like Kohl's and GameStop before it, hoping to induce a so-called short squeeze. Short sellers bet against companies by borrowing shares from brokers and immediately selling them, hoping to buy the shares back for less later and pocket the difference. If the stock starts rising instead, short sellers may need to buy their shares back to exit from the losing trade, a cycle that creates even more demand and can send shares soaring.

The frenzy continued on Wednesday. Shares of GoPro soared 12% and Krispy Kreme jumped 5% despite no clear impetus to buy. Both stocks traded under $4 just days earlier. Meanwhile, shares of Opendoor tumbled 19% and Kohl's slid 13%, underscoring the wild volatility of meme stocks.

The short squeezes and dizzying rally in meme stocks are the latest sign of a frothy stock market. Investors have already been buying up shares of money-losing companies, underpinning a market rally that has lifted indexes to repeated records and out of the depths of the tariff-driven April selloff.

"You don't generally pump meme stocks if you think the stock market's going to go down 20% tomorrow," said SpotGamma's Kochuba.

Options traders are piling in, too. More than 3.4 million Opendoor options contracts changed hands Monday, making up around 10% of all single-stock options volumes that day, according to Cboe Global Markets data. That is more than the combined options volumes that changed hands for Tesla and Nvidia, according to SpotGamma data.

With a market capitalization around $2 billion, Opendoor is a member of the Russell 2000 small-cap index. The fact that more Opendoor options traded Monday than contracts tied to Nvidia, the $4 trillion behemoth, was unusual, said Andrew Hiesinger, founder of options-data platform Quant Data.

"That's pretty much unheard of," Hiesinger said. "And that trading increase obviously wasn't tied to fundamentals. It was a speculative squeeze."

QuantumScape is another name getting social-media attention and outsize options activity, Hiesinger said.

QuantumScape shares are up more than 200% in the past month despite no clear news catalyst. Some social-media users are speculating that a partnership with Tesla could be announced when Tesla reports earnings on Wednesday. With almost 20% of QuantumScape shares sold short, the stock fits the highly shorted profile favored by the meme-stock crowd.

On popular internet forums like Reddit's WallStreetBets, users bragged about the week's spoils.

One Tuesday morning entry from u/otterlarry included a screenshot of a Kohl's call-option position on the Robinhood. The 50 options contracts, purchased for a total of $6 on Monday, now had a market value of $30,000. Calls give the right to buy a stock at a certain price.

"My biggest gain ever," the user wrote.