While ASX investors grapple with a budget due to be released tonight that is likely to ding them hard on capital gains tax (CGT)…
There are bigger fish to fry in the global market in the coming months.
Not least of which is the current threat of an Iran War flare-up.
Trump said in the last 24 hours that the ceasefire is on “life support”.
Brent crude is charging higher today to around ~US$105 a barrel.
And yet, somehow, despite all this, my ASX watchlists are quite green today.
What gives?
Well strap in. Markets have an even LARGER fish to fry than the Iran War.
Source: X
Yes, the AI stock boom is reminding
investors of the dotcom bust
Cast your mind back to 1999.
Sydney was prepping for the Olympics. Dial-up was king. Any company that bolted “.com” onto its name saw its share price moon overnight.
You know how that ended.
Well, Bloomberg has just put out some numbers that get the imagination going in a decidedly bad way.
Since 2023, 33 companies on major US exchanges have changed their names to reference AI themes.
But it’s not just AI, it’s crypto too…
One tiny pharma company called Qualigen Therapeutics, two months away from being delisted from the Nasdaq, simply rebranded itself “AIxCrypto Holdings”.
Its share price more than doubled.
Then it crashed back down 30% below where it started.
One potentially cynical company renamed itself “NewBird AI” earlier this year.
The stock went up around six-fold, then promptly crashed 63%.
Analysts are now comparing it to “Long Island Iced Tea”, which infamously rebranded itself “Long Blockchain Corp” in 2017 before delisting altogether.
You can’t make this stuff up.
And I’ve seen these rebrand, flavour-of-the-month outbreaks like this in past bull cycles for the ASX too.
Ramping announcements spread like wildfire as the new hot buzzwords get smashed into every line to make foolhardy investors salivate.
It’s not pretty, and it happens more regularly than you think.
The hot money is piling in regardless
The devil may care attitude of a potential top manifests in the hype cycle behaviours of investors and company names.
According to Bloomberg Intelligence, investors poured ~US$8.7 billion into AI-themed ETFs in Q3 2025 alone.
For comparison, the strongest quarter for crypto and blockchain ETF inflows was just shy of US$1.3 billion in Q1 2021.
That’s roughly seven times more cash flooding into AI ETFs than crypto ever managed at its peak.
There were 18 AI-themed ETFs launched in 2024 and another eight in 2025.
A study by Acadian Asset Management looked at 870 firms in the Vanguard Total Stock Market ETF universe that changed names since 2017.
The median ETF stock fell 2% within a month of the AI/crypto rebrand. And they were down by an average of 18% a year later.
So, are we close to the top?
Some bearish investors think, Nvidia, AMD, and the whole gang are pricing in a future where every fridge, toaster and pet rock has AI baked into it.
Maybe that future arrives. Maybe it doesn’t.
Back in the dotcom days, Cisco hit US$80 a share in March 2000. It then took roughly 25 years for that stock to recover.
Now look, I’m not telling you the AI boom is fake.
The data centre buildout is real. The hyperscalers are rapidly charging towards a US$1 trillion data centre capex.
Those are real picks and shovels.
The question is whether we are buying picks and shovels right now, or whether we are buying the snake-oil hype in a REALLY bad way…
Tomorrow: a deeper look from
a new voice at Fat Tail…
Tomorrow, you’ll hear from a new addition to the Fat Tail team.
He’s been studying the parallels between the late-90s telco bubble and today’s AI capex frenzy.
So what happens when the demand falls short of the supply? Who picks up the wreckage?
It’s going to be a cracking read. Don’t miss it.
Warm regards,
Lachlann Tierney,
Australian Small-Cap Investigator and Fat Tail Microcaps
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