It’s a brave new world.

The millions of traders that migrated to app trading on their smartphones have the ability to overwhelm virtually any market with the same shock and awe that military tacticians employ and fear.

The Reddit crowd frequently refers to themselves as “APES,” supporting each other with such lines as “apes strong together.” Our AI and machine-learning programs track this chatter from Wall Street Bets (WSB) and Twitter, helping us target the next GameStop ($GME) or AMC ($AMC).

Some have called the stocks that the apes gang up on “meme stocks” as this younger contingent of traders tends to post various memes from “Braveheart,” “The 300,” “Rockets to the Moon,” etc., with encouragement to their fellow apes to hold the line. This uniformity and commitment has paid huge dividends to those in the community and those of us who follow this activity. But the real force behind these moves is leverage, and that comes from options.

Yesterday, when AMC was trading at $40–more than 20 times the level where it began  2021–it would cost $40,000 to take a 1,000-share position. But an option to own AMC at $46 for two weeks was traded for just $8. So a position that would control 1,000 shares from $46 would cost $8,000, not the $40,000 it would cost to buy shares. This leverage is why the community that trades Reddit Rebel stocks expresses their bullish outlook in options.

AMC was nearly 11 percent of that (4.6M contracts) by itself! To put that in perspective, Apple ($AAPL) traded 850,000 contracts, Microsoft ($MSFT) 200,000 contracts, Amazon ($AMZN) 178,000 contracts, Facebook ($FB) 175,000 contracts, Netflix ($NFLX) 70,000 contracts, and Alphabet ($GOOGL) 55,000 contracts.

In other words, AMC traded seven times more volume than all of FANG stocks combined. It wasn’t alone in extraordinary option volume:

BlackBerry ($BB) traded 1.8 million contracts, or three times the volume of FANG stocks; Palantir ($PLTR) traded 820,000 contracts or about 120 percent of FANG volume; Rocket ($RKT) traded 600,000 contracts, nearly matching all FANG volume; Bed Bath & Beyond ($BBBY) traded 260,000 contracts; and Beyond Meat ($BYND) traded 175,000 contracts.

Why so much volume it trading in these names seems clear: 1) These stocks are in the news and universally chatted about on Reddit and, to a lesser extent, on Twitter; 2) Short interests in most cases are high:

$BBBY short interest is 31%, $BYND short interest is 25%, $AMC short interest is 23%, $BB short interest is 8%, and $PLTR short interest is 7%.

Those numbers should speak for themselves.