In 2006…two years IN ADVANCE of the
Lehman Brothers collapse…we prepped you
for a world AFTER the great credit bubble.

The current AI bubble is four times bigger.
17 times the size of the dotcom mania.

Going into 2026, we’re initiating our
SECOND great correction battle-plan…

You’re invited to be a free online observer —
while we flesh out what to buy, 
what to sell,
and how to prepare for an investment world:

Over four days from Dec 1-4, we’re mustering the
entire
Fat Tail brains trust to figure out
what to do about this AI bubble.

It’s no time to panic. But it IS time to THINK.

And make a few sensible, calculated moves…

To register your interest, type your email
in the box below and click the button

THINK TANK #1 starts at
1pm AEDT, Monday, 1 December.

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We will collect and handle your personal information in accordance with our Privacy Policy.

“Investors have before them an opportunity as extraordinary as this bubble.

That it will disappear someday is a certainty.

That it will blow up catastrophically is a fair bet.

But thanks to the delusions of your fellow investors, you now have a way to make that bet with the odds in your favour…”

This Silly Season, sensible investors have ‘bubbly’ on the mind.

And I’m not talking about a festive glass of Veuve Clicquot…

It’s clear AI’s turned the U.S. stock market into a toxic House of Dynamite. With worrying signs that the fuse has been lit…

...

When a bubble even half this size deflates, it ushers a period of wealth destruction. A contagion effect across other sectors and markets, all around the world, due to financial interconnectedness.

Here in Australia, the ASX is trading at an unsettling 21-times next year’s earnings. The ETF bubble also appears to be reaching its own popping point.

Here’s the problem. While the Australian Stock Exchange is dominated by banks and miners – rather than AI and big tech – we FEED off those trends. Aussie investors have profited from the AI wave almost as much as Americans.

“From these levels, a lot can go wrong,” Allan Gray’s investment chief, Simon Mawhinney, just told the AFR.

“If history is a guide, it likely will…”

Maybe it’s already started.

Australia’s benchmark S&P/ASX 200 hit a record 9,115 points in October. Then a global sell-down meant it quickly shed about 7%.

Now, the AI bubble may well keep inflating all through 2026.

The capex (capital expenditure) boom is real.

The productivity gains to come (at some point) will be real.

But here’s something else that’s real…

People are no longer just contemplating what a world after the first AI bubble looks like.

Some are starting to actually position for it…

Japanese investment giant Softbank recently sold off its ENTIRE stake in Nvidia. And now Peter Thiel’s hedge fund is following suit.

Michael Burry, who made a killing predicting the last big bubble pop, just made another 'Big Short'. This time against AI growth stocks.

Even Mark Zuckerberg just admitted “a collapse is definitely possible.”

Locally, there are early signs Australian investors are trimming exposure to AI and tech, and rotating back into resources (real assets).

One major Aussie manager just made waves by being one of the first to publicly rehouse money out of the bubbly stuff…and into ‘boring reliables’.

So, with all the above in mind…

You might think our
‘catastrophic blow-up’

prediction in that big
opening quote was
something
we published yesterday…

But no.

Daily Reckoning Australia
September 11, 2006

“Investors have before them an opportunity as extraordinary as this bubble. That it will disappear someday is a certainty. That it will blow up catastrophically is a fair bet.

But thanks to the delusions of your fellow investors, you now have a way to make that bet with the odds in your favour…”

That was actually one of the very first missives we put in front of our followers, way back on September 11, 2006.

Five years to the day after 9/11.

And almost two years to the day before the catastrophic blow-up we said was a ‘fair bet’: the Lehman Brothers collapse.

It’s been nearly two decades since we made that bet.

If you were a founding Fat Tailer, you would have done very well indeed to heed it.

Overall, many of the chips we advised you to place…the pre-bust melt-up moves we pinpointed…and the pre-emptive selling measures we prescribed…meant you could have emerged from the GFC significantly better off than most.

But 20 years on, a
far bigger crisis looms…

And a new plan is required…

You are invited to be a fly on the wall as the whole Fat Tail team formulates this plan — in REAL TIME.

We’ve never conducted an exercise like this before.

You will get realistic assessments. Timings. Likely scenarios.

You will get specific protection, allocation and portfolio trimming suggestions.

But most importantly, you will get specific ‘melt-up’ plays and the names of stocks that could most likely benefit from that return on capex in 2026 and beyond.

All you need to do is register below and we’ll provide you online access to sit in (or view the replays).

But we MUST have your registration now here…

To register your interest, type your email
in the box below and click the button

THINK TANK #1 starts at
1pm AEDT, Monday, 1 December.

Please read our Terms & Conditions.
We will collect and handle your personal information in accordance with our Privacy Policy.

If you’ve been watching the
markets in
recent weeks
with a sense of growing
unease,
it’s not unwarranted…

MacroStrategy analyst Julien Garran is famous for using an economic framework called the "Wicksellian deficit" to measure capital misallocation.

According to Garran, this current misallocation is unlike anything seen in modern or ancient history.

And it’s not simply about overvalued AI companies.

First, you’ve got terrifyingly concentrated risk.

A handful of mega-cap tech firms all-in on AI basically COMPRISING the market. Where they go on Wall Street…so does your portfolio here in Australia.

Second, you’ve got INSANE capital expenditures concentrated in a tiny slice of the global economy — primarily data centers filled with GPUs and specialised infrastructure. This build-out is so large that data-center and software spending accounted for about 92% of US GDP growth in the first half of 2025 by some estimates! 

That is a DEFCON 1 signal all by itself.

The dotcom bubble was a pipsqueak by comparison.

Third, you’ve got a whole load of balance sheet shenanigans and complex financial engineering (just like 2007/2008). Where large firms are using accounting maneuvers like shifting AI spending off their main books into special purpose vehicles (SPVs) and underreporting infrastructure costs to inflate profits.

Finally, just like with the dotcom boom, you’ve got companies small and large…all over the planet…who in 2026 have to start walking-the-walk.

Meaning: translate massive investments into sustainable profits and meaningful business transformation.

You wouldn’t believe how many so called ‘leading’ AI companies have yet to turn a dime in profits! With high operating expenses far outstripping revenues.

Pets.com was a posterchild of this in the dotcom bust.

Picture that…times a hundred…

Julien Garran says the capital
misallocation right
now is 17 times
the size of the dotcom bubble

And about four times the size of the 2008 credit (subprime) bubble which we navigated our very first followers through.

But these will not be doom and gloom sessions.

We’re living through one of the biggest technology build-outs since the dotcom era — maybe since electrification.

Right now, AI is doing two things at once:

Economically, it’s still in that messy, uneven “dial-up” phase where adoption is slower than the hype admits. Most enterprises are experimenting, not transforming.

In AFTER AI, we’re going to look at ways you can ride any further melt-up in 2026...but also prepare for a nasty drawdown if it happens.

The wave could rise far, far higher before it finally breaks.

Having a plan matters more than perfectly timing the turn.

In other words…

Don’t underestimate the possibility that 2026 may rhyme with 2000 or 2008 in terms of an AI-led shock.

But DON’T BANK ON IT EITHER.

Also don’t forget that those same periods set up some of the best long-term buying opportunities of our lifetimes.

We’re going to be exploring those longer-term plays in AFTER AI as well. And you should listen to what we have to say, because Fat Tail has been here before, 20 years ago…

Back then, we had a fraction of the expertise and specialist firepower than we have going into 2026.

As I just said, we’re going to explore some distinct opportunities presenting themselves in three stages:

  • Before the coming AI meltdown — you could broadly describe these as ‘melt-up’ plays.
  • During the correction — provided you beat the crowd into currently unloved assets less correlated to tech. Here is where you can also use market volatility to systematically enter key positions.
  • And after things begin to stabilise — this is where things get really interesting. Where you go bargain shopping for the AI rulers of the next ten years…plus stocks associated with NEW emerging trends…while they’re still discounted by panic selling and liquidity crunches.

From Dec 1–4, we’re mustering our Fat Tail brains to figure out all of the above.

It’ll be a series of targeted strategy sessions that focus on wealth protection…short-term ‘melt-up’ plays…long-term ‘After the Pop’ opportunities…and themes that might even displace AI as the ‘next big thing’…

Expect some clear answers to tough questions.

And an emerging broad plan of action you could consider adopting with your portfolio right now.

I have also requested each analyst to prepare at least one specific move or idea that encapsulates their own AI thesis.

To sit in for free to get these ideas, put your name down here….

To register your interest, type your email
in the box below and click the button

THINK TANK #1 starts at
1pm AEDT, Monday, 1 December.

Please read our Terms & Conditions.
We will collect and handle your personal information in accordance with our Privacy Policy.

Like I say, we’ve
danced this dance before…

The credit bust that caused the last deep bear market and evaporated trillions in wealth seems so obvious in retrospect.

In 2006, it was anything but to the average investor.

Few in America…let alone Australia…had the faintest idea what mortgage-backed securities (MBS) and collateralised debt obligations (CDOs) were.  

At the time, super fund managers, brokers and financial advisors were still insisting you stay bullish.

Many senior personnel at rating agencies were downplaying or ignoring rising risks in American mortgage-backed securities and other financial products. Even while privately admitting an unhappy ending was inevitable…

"Let's hope we are all
wealthy and retired by
the time
this house of cards falters…"

…admitted one cynical 2006 internal memo that has since surfaced.

Even the RBA’s 2006 Financial Stability Review told you that credit risks at the time were generally viewed as manageable!

So, for a publishing startup 20 years ago…with scant readers and zero subscription revenue…

…sounding this alarm so emphatically was an audacious opening gamble.

We were a bunch of unknown, starry-eyed contrarians.

With a mission to offer an alternative view from the ‘captured’ professionals. The brokerage houses. Commission-compromised financial advisors. The interest-conflicted fund managers. The Big Media journalists.

They were all in denial of what was coming.

Or privately KNEW what was coming…but instead of warning you, clung to the company line of ‘cautious optimism’.

As you know…

That’s not how we roll
here at Fat Tail…

Look, trust me, it would have been easy for us to hitch a ride on the cautious optimism train at the time! We needed customers.

In 2006 we were engaged in a search to find a few like-minded people who would be interested in our non-mainstream take on investing. (Not as easy back then as it is now with social media. Much of our outreach was conducted through letters sent in the post!)

So, coming right out the gates with an ‘End is Nigh’ prophecy stemming from a mortgage market on the other side of the world…well, that could be construed as start-up suicide!

But our founder and early financial backer — the famous contrarian thinker Bill Bonner — insisted that the first big thing we’d need to navigate you through was the coming collapse of the US’s ‘Ponzi Economy’. And the end of a two-decade easy money boom.

"Eventually, everyone gets too
stretched out
 on credit...
the bubble finds a pin somewhere,

and the air wheezes out."

Bill was right. And we were right to form a preparation strategy much earlier than everyone else.

We had five core parts to our ‘After the Credit Bust’ plan, which we began implementing midway in 2006.

Most worked…

STRATEGY #1
“Make sure you have
a gold position…”

At the time of that call, gold was trading at just $624-an-ounce.

By September 2009, gold was $1,137.50 per ounce.

Today, it’s $4,000.

STRATEGY #2
“Get exposure to the
exploration rush while you can…”

The "exploration rush" of 2006–2007 was the culminating phase of the Australian mining boom where juniors aggressively explored and invested ahead of the GFC.

And we got our followers’ noses ahead of it, just like James Cooper is doing in the space today.

STRATEGY #3
“Oil prices are heading up,
and shares with them…”

This general call was spot-on in 2006. From a low of $56, oil prices then rose to a peak of $147 peak in 2008.

By December 2006, one of our only two advisories had an Oil and Gas segment of the portfolio, with eight key energy positions.

One of those was Woodside Petroleum.

Woodside went from $35 at the start of 2007 to peak at $66 in 2008. By comparison, the ASX 200 lost ground by a few percent in this same timeframe.

Now, it feels pertinent to admit that not all of our calls were this bang on the money.

In fact, there was a whole part of our ‘After the Credit Bust’ plan that didn’t play out as expected…

STRATEGY #4
“The next big thing…crisis or not…
is CLEAN ENERGY…”

Believe it or not, hardly anyone was even talking about this topic in investment circles in 2006. Let alone going after the kind of stocks we recommended when we first opened for business.

But this was a case of being over-eager as a new business.

And way too far out on the Fat Tail bell-curve…at the wrong time in the market cycle.

The general idea was spot on. The timing wasn’t.

Lesson learnt.

We won’t be making a similar mistake in our After AI battle-plan.

Now, the final strategy came near the end, in September 2007.  

It was the most drastic and controversial one…a spectacular call we don’t believe anyone in the world made at the time…

Some readers…even colleagues over in America…considered it nuts. But it was incredibly prescient…

STRATEGY #5
“Liquidate ALL North American stock positions NOW!”

One year before the Lehman collapse, our first publisher Dan Denning made a crazy call.

Sell all your American-listed recommendations. And do it NOW.

You risk looking panicky and reactionary with a call like that.

It was beyond brave. But as Dan said at the time in an internal memo explaining the move to us:

“The August tumult caught out the most poorly prepared leveraged borrowers. But it precipitated something larger. It would be stupid to ignore the sign. Nothing is worth buying or even owning, given the level of risk and volatility. Stocks aren't going to rally 30%.
                  
It is the first time in my career I've been this worried…”

The day Dan sent this email and decided to GET OUT OF EVERYTHING AMERICAN — August 31, 2007 — the Dow Jones Industrial Average was 13,983.

By March 6, 2009, when the Dow hit a low closing price of 6,469.95. A fall of 54%.

In the washup of that last
‘catastrophic bust’
we predicted
and prepared for two years early…

…the United States alone had seen household wealth decimated from $61.4 trillion in early 2007 to around $50.4 trillion by early 2009, a drop of $11 trillion.

And the crisis rapidly spread globally.

Causing stock market crashes, plunging property values, business failures, and soaring unemployment everywhere.

In Australia, we got cushioned a little because we had a China-driven mining boom entering his white-hot exploration phase.

Even so, the crisis we were shouting about and preparing our early followers for in 2006 still caused major falls in investment portfolios…collapses in Australian firms…and froze billions of dollars, which deeply affected retail investors and superannuation holders.

Typical equity holdings in superannuation funds fell by around 20–30% or more during 2008 alone.

Imagine your retirement pot 30% down in a year!

For some old-timers reading this, you don’t have to imagine it.

You lived it!

Unless…of course…you implemented some of our preemptive strategies outlined above.

Which is why, today…in the midst of what is sure to be a cataclysmic boom-bust event…

We’re formulating a new plan.

A key point to note though is that in Australia, we’re relatively insulated from the AI bubble.

Yes, if the US goes down, our market will go down too. But there are stocks and sectors to hide in that are likely to perform relatively well in a tech-led US bear market.

We’re about to explore those opportunities in detail.

And today we have 10-times the brainpower than we had at our disposal in 2006..

If you want to be there while we chart a course for next year and beyond…in real time…get your name down below.

To register your interest, type your email
in the box below and click the button

THINK TANK #1 starts at
1pm AEDT, Monday, 1 December.

Please read our Terms & Conditions.
We will collect and handle your personal information in accordance with our Privacy Policy.

...

How to Protect Yourself
and Profit from the End
of the First
Artificial Intelligence Bubble

We’re clearly not talking about the END of AI.

But we’re conclusively at a point where hype is waning, profits are lacking and success is lagging.

“We’ve gone along this hype cycle and are now in the trough of disillusionment so to speak, where people are realizing that [AI] is not all magic and fairy dust,” says Erik Brown, senior partner of AI and product engineering at West Monroe Partners.

When the dotcom bubble burst, the S&P500 fell 50% over two and a bit years.

But the ASX wasn’t tech heavy and actually kept rallying while the S&P500 fell. It peaked in March 2002, two years after the US market peak. And then it only fell 23%.

So as Aussie investors, we have a little advantage here…

And if we do see a bust, it’ll be the beginning of something bigger than we’ve seen so far…

We are at the start of a foundational, multi-year technological wave that will ebb and flow.

Odds are that the best gains will be on the table from 2027 onwards…AFTER this first clean-out.  

After the dotcom bust, the internet FULLY took over the world and brought stunning returns for patient investors who bought AFTER the bust, but BEFORE the technology fully matured.

Take Amazon as an example.

The dotcom bust took Amazon from $100 to $7.

From $7 it then soared to an absolute peak stock price (adjusted for splits) of $1,773 per share in 2020.

But perhaps most importantly, when considering a world AFTER this first AI bubble…

The supreme gains of the last 25
years
came from Internet stocks
that
WEREN’T EVEN LISTED

during the dotcom bust…

Tesla was founded in 2003, in the dotcom rubble. You could pick up shares for $14 in 2010. They were $1,243 in late 2021.

YouTube didn’t come till 2005. Facebook, Shopify and Twitter in 2006.

The point being…

The dotcom bubble of the late 1990s was just the beginning of the internet's wealth potential, not the peak.

Early investors who kept their powder dry in the initial wipeout…and bought smartly in the aftermath…captured enormous gains.

Yes, there’s the potential for this bust to be very scary, with capital misallocation vastly exceeding prior booms.

But what it will do is push the reset button.

And the epoch of the largest, most practical, and most profitable AI companies will begin…

The purpose of these three sessions is to help you transition from BEFORE the first AI shakeout…to the era beyond.

Here’s what you’ll be sitting in on if you register today:

THINK TANK SESSION #1
The “Fat Tail Risk” of an
AI Bubble Contagion

Participants: Greg Canavan, Nick Hubble,

Charlie Ormond, Lachlann Tierney, Murray Dawes

...

Will 2026 be an inflection point when the AI bubble’s bursting provokes a market contagion? We’ll be assessing both the risks AND the possibilities in this session…

  • Charlie Ormond will show you how we’re in a “line goes up” phase going into 2026, echoing the same psychology of the pre-2008 housing boom…
  • Greg Cavanan will explain why he’s 20% in cash and avoiding ALL U.S. stocks right now, with an eye on a fast-growing but under-reported ETF bubble…
  • Nick Hubble will explore how the upcoming US mid-term politics — particularly Trump’s economic incentives — could shape the fate of the AI boom in 2026…
  • Murray Dawes will walk you through emerging bottlenecks in AI data-centre and energy infrastructure, and how they could trigger a show me the money’ stage for certain AI hopefuls…and a potentially steep derating of hyperscalers’ share prices…
  • And Lachlann Tierney will make a spirited case for AI stocks being considerably HIGHER this time next year, arguing that even a bubble burst will create exceptional buying opportunities.

THINK TANK SESSION #2

The Opportunities and

the Dangers in 2026

Participants: Lachlann Tierney, Charlie Ormond,
James Cooper, Brian Chu, Murray Dawes

...

This is where things start to get really interesting. Because we’re going to delve deeper into strategy, talking specific ideas and moves.

  • Charlie Ormond will share his personal 2026 strategy of “respecting the AI bubble without worshipping it”, highlighting three lesser-known stocks he believes can ride the wave sensibly
  • Lachlann Tierney’s keeping his plans here under wraps until the day! But I can tell you now, he’s probably the biggest AI optimist for 2026 on the whole team.
  • James Cooper will explain how mining and AI are increasingly interlinked, and why 2026 could be a ‘speculative hour’ in resources not seen since 2005. 
  • Murray Dawes will walk through charts of emerging ‘agentic AI’ stocks that he believes could shine in 2026…regardless of what the wider market does.
  • And Brian Chu’s preparing to drop a bit of a bomb on where he sees gold fitting into the equation next year. (And why certain gold stocks should actually be AVOIDED if sentiment briefly turns sour on AI and the big technology stocks.)

THINK TANK SESSION #3

AFTER AI: Mega-Themes
to Position Into to
Take Your
Portfolio Through to 2030

Participants: James Woodburn, Greg Canavan

...

This is where Editorial Director Greg Canavan and I do a deep dive on LONG-RANGE portfolio strategy. From 2026 to 2030.

We’ll be talking about:

  • Nick Hubble’s “Back to Reliables” thesis.  A REVERSAL of the Net Zero/renewables boom and a return to dependable energy sources (gas, oil, nuclear).
  • How Charlie Ormond is working on something he calls “Decade of Bottlenecks” — in energy, semiconductors, high-bandwidth memory shortages. Where structural constraints create new winners.
  • The “COMING LONGEVITY BOOM”...that’s a huge one with the potential to rival AI in terms of investment attention over the next decade. An emerging investment frontier — biotech, AI-driven drug discovery, anti-aging.
  • A new Fat Tail stock shorting strategy we have in development. We’ve shied away from a pure shorting advisory in the past. Partly because we could never find the right strategy and expert. And maybe a little bit because it just seemed like a bit of a negative way to approach investing strategy. But that may be about to change. There could be some big gains on the table soon by getting yourself on the right side of big stock falls…
  • And here we’ll announce a little get-together we’re planning called FT1…

It’s basically an extended, superpowered, IN-PERSON version of these think-tank sessions. Over a single afternoon and evening at the Windsor Hotel in Melbourne.

But with a few superstar guests.

And hopefully, with YOU in the room with us.

But you need to fit the criteria to get a seat. And those seats will be limited.

In conclusion…

AFTER AI: Strategies to Protect Yourself and Profit from the End of the First Artificial Intelligence Bubble is an every-analyst deep-dive the likes of which we have never done in our 20-year history.

It is entirely free for you to be there with us.

The advice that comes out of it could be transformational for your portfolio between 2026 and 2030.

SO PLEASE…MAKE SURE YOU’RE THERE WHEN WE KICK OFF!

All you need to do is secure your spot below.

To register your interest, type your email
in the box below and click the button

THINK TANK #1 starts at
1pm AEDT, Monday, 1 December.

Please read our Terms & Conditions.
We will collect and handle your personal information in accordance with our Privacy Policy.

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