Stocks with strongest demand for bullish options keep outperforming the S&P 500

Surging demand for options contracts has accompanied a rally for stocks this year as both professional and retail traders have piled into bullish bets on individual stocks at the fastest pace since the meme-stock craze, according to data from Cboe Global Markets.To illustrate the relationship between heavy call buying and stock-market returns, a team of equity strategists at Citigroup found that a group of 50 companies with the heaviest demand for bullish options has outperformed the S&P 500