“It’s a bull market and it’s a good opportunity to make some quick bucks,” she said earlier this week. “I really do not want to miss the boat.”

China has already added 6.44 million new traders in the first five months of the year, according to data published by China Securities Depository and Clearing, more than the population of Singapore and just shy of the size in Hong Kong. Home-bound in various stages of pandemic lockdown, they boosted the number to 166 million at the end of May, making them the single biggest collection of individual investors.

While the clearing house has not released the number of new investors for June, media reports suggested a stampede-like interest. Citic Securities and Guotai Junan Securities, the nation’s biggest brokerages, both recorded 30 per cent jump over May, the reports said.

As an indication, individual investors snapped up newly launched mutual funds amounting to 665 billion yuan this year through June, exceeding 523 billion yuan of purchases in the whole of 2019. Foreign investors in recent weeks have also jumped in on the sign of economic upturn.

“With the virus under control domestically and short-term indicators of overseas economies showing signs of bottoming out, investors' confidence in the A-share market continues to pick up,” said Zhu Chaoping, a strategist at JPMorgan Asset Management in Shanghai. Large-scale quantitative easing policies and domestic savings have led money managers to gravitate toward A shares, Zhu added.

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The rapid jump in stock prices has stoked concerns about the boom-to-bust cycle that followed such a frenzy in 2015. That year, US$5 trillion was wiped off in the meltdown, when the Shanghai Composite slumped more than 40 per cent within three months from the peak.

Still, that scenario is not playing out any time soon, at least according to Morgan Stanley. Chinese equities have not overshot their fundamentals, the US investment bank said.

“A-shares are benefiting from strong new fund launches and rising retail investor account openings in the context of regulatory support and an ongoing market reform push,” Hong Kong-based strategists Laura Wang and Jonathan Garner wrote in a report on Tuesday.

Morgan Stanley raised the one-year target for the CSI 300 Index of the mainland-traded big-caps by 29 per cent to 5,360 points, because of a more secure outlook of earnings growth. The target implies a 13 per cent upside from current levels.

A proprietary index compiled by Morgan Stanley to track sentiment on Chinese stocks suggests the market has not reached a tipping point. The gauge stood at 65 on July 6, it said, versus 75 before the market topped out and crash in 2015.

The Shanghai Composite rose for an eighth consecutive day through Thursday, taking its 14-day relative strength index to 90.8, way beyond the 70 technical level that is normally regarded as an overbought threshold. It fell 2 per cent at the close on Friday.

Liu, the Shanghai interior designer, is waiting on the sideline to buy the dips.

“Even in a bull market, stocks wouldn’t rise all the time,” she said. “When they start to fall, then will come my opportunity.”