NEW YORK, Feb 14 Reuters Some of Wall Street39;s most speculative names, including meme stocks and shares of artificial intelligence companies, are leading the equity market rally this year, helped by renewed interest from retail investors.

Retail investors had a poor year in 2022, with the average portfolio ending the year down around 35 from alltime highs, Vanda Research previously estimated.

However, retail investors have shown renewed interest in the early part of 2023. Aggregate inflows into the U.S. stock market, though concentrated in a few names, has reached levels last seen in 202021, according to Vanda Research.

Shares of companies linked to artificial intelligence have soared after U.S. firm OpenAI, the owner of ChatGPT, a chatbot that gives strikingly humanlike responses to user queries, snagged a multibillion dollar investment from Microsoft Corp.

Meme stocks have clawed back some of last year39;s losses, while shares of larger, techfocused companies such as Nvidia and Tesla have also joined in the fray.

The Nasdaq Composite Index, home of many smaller, more speculative companies as well as the megacaps, is up 13 this year, after a 33 loss in 2022. The SP 500 index is up about 7.

We39;ve definitely seen risk appetites return to equity markets this year, said Steve Sosnick, chief strategist at Interactive Brokers.

AI BOOM

Companies building artificial intelligence tools have been among the rally39;s biggest winners, a move market observers say has been…