The stock market’s nearly relentless rally has left some traders exhilarated but wary — and muttering the “m” word. M, of course, is for “melt-up.”

The S&P 500 SPX is trading around 10% above its 200-day moving average, noted Adam Turnquist, chief technical strategist for LPL Financial. Few individual shares in the index are significantly overbought, but it’s a development to watch, while overall conditions suggest the market may be ”moving more toward melt-up mode,” he said in an interview.

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What’s not to like about a melt-up? Don’t bulls want stocks to rise? Indeed, they do — but a melt-up is a Wall Street term for a rally that goes too far, too fast, driven by herd-like behavior, pulling forward future gains. The problem can be the “meltdown” that tends to follow.

The S&P 500 finished with a marginal loss on Friday, a day after booking a record close, as it snapped a four-day winning streak but still logged a 1.6% weekly gain. The index has rallied more than 32% from its post-“liberation day” low set in April. Investors have shrugged off signs of a slowing U.S. economy, putting faith in the prospect of Federal Reserve interest-rate cuts and strong corporate earnings.

Wednesday’s session saw shares of Oracle Corp. ORCL — a tech behemoth with a market capitalization approaching $1 trillion — experience a melt-up of their own, soaring 36% after announcing blockbuster artificial-intelligence computing contracts.

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Analysts at Bespoke Investment Group see the U.S. stock market in “extreme overbought” territory, with a large majority of index ETFs now trading two or more standard deviations above their 50-day moving averages.

Satya Pradhuman, director of research at Cirrus Research, argued that a melt-up is already underway.

“The melt-up of risk-taking in U.S. equities has pierced the upper boundaries of a normalized range,” he wrote in a note Thursday night. “A combination of a very crowded equity market, combined with an extreme risk appetite, places the U.S. equity market into an overtly speculative chapter.”

As a result, the firm’s asset-allocation model now recommends investors go underweight equities relative to its longtime average for the first time in three years, Pradhuman noted. “An underweight to equities in this model is a natural outgrowth of an overly speculative phase that needs to be tamped down with additional fundamental support,” he said.

LPL’s Turnquist said the best bet is to stay calm and patient.

An important test could come Wednesday with the Federal Reserve’s interest-rate decision. A cut of at least a quarter of a percentage point is seen as virtually assured, but investors will be looking for affirmation of a series of cuts to follow. The market may be vulnerable to a pullback if not.

Given the current market setup, LPL thinks investors should have equity exposure equal to their benchmark and be ready to move overweight if a pullback — probably in the range of a 5% to 10% retreat — materializes, Turnquist said.

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