A Dot-Com-Bubble Blueprint for Making Money Today
It's 1999 all over again... Replace 'Internet' with 'AI'... So much money, they don't know what to do with it... Whitney Tilson's blueprint for navigating this risky market... The next catalyst... Watch Whitney's free presentation now.
'I feel like I've traveled back in time'...
So said our colleague Whitney Tilson during the free presentation he debuted this morning.
Whitney was talking about the mood in the market today. As he noted, investors are focused on AI, sending a bazooka of money into buzzy tech names. The exuberance has pushed stock prices higher and higher as if the bull market could never end.
It reminds Whitney of 1999... You know, the year before the peak of the dot-com bubble. What followed wasn't pretty – not in 2000, and not for a few years after that. The tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite Index lost nearly 80% of its value from its top to its 2002 bottom.
Here's how Whitney put it this morning...
Every generation or so, there's a "tentpole" year that changes everything.
You say "1999" to anyone who was investing back then, and they don't think of a year... They think of a feeling. Same with "2008." Or "2020." You don't even need the rest of the sentence. Just the year does the work.
As Whitney wrote in Friday's Digest and detailed further this morning, he thinks 2026 is one of those years... and that most people haven't figured it out yet. Those that do, though, have a generational opportunity to protect and grow their wealth...
The 'What should we do with all this money?' meeting...
One of the anecdotes that Whitney offered this morning stuck with me (Corey McLaughlin) as a sign of where we're at right now...
He said he'd heard that employees of OpenAI and Anthropic – the next two companies in line for the IPOs everyone is waiting on – had gathered in San Francisco a few weeks ago for a meeting titled, "What should we do with all this money?"
As Whitney said...
That's what you get in a bull market that's fast becoming a mania. Everyone's making so much money, common sense just goes out the window.
We'll add some numbers to that...
Right now, the 10 largest U.S. stocks account for around 40% of the S&P 500 Index's total market-cap-weighted value. That's more than 10 percentage points higher than what the top 10 accounted for at the peak of the dot-com bubble in 2000.
Nvidia (NVDA) makes up more than 7% of the U.S. benchmark, followed by Apple (AAPL), Alphabet (GOOGL), Microsoft (MSFT), Amazon (AMZN), Broadcom (AVGO), Meta Platforms (META), Tesla (TSLA), Micron Technology (MU), and Berkshire Hathaway (BRK-B).
The "market" is extremely heavy on AI... even more so than everyone was invested in the Internet in 1999. That means the bust could be larger, too, and you'll want to be prepared for it.
What Whitney bought in 1999 instead...
Longtime readers probably know the basic story... In 1999, Whitney raised money from friends and family to start a hedge fund.
But what Whitney doesn't talk about publicly very often is who wrote the biggest check. It was the father of a friend from his Harvard days – a man named Larry, who ran one of the largest mortgage-brokerage firms in New York.
Larry put a quarter of a million dollars into Whitney's fund, more than anyone else had committed at that point. His son Bill is now a billionaire who runs the hedge fund Pershing Square Capital Management. (If you follow financial news, you've likely seen headlines about Bill Ackman and Pershing Square.)
Whitney was determined not to let Larry and his other investors down...
Managing money for people close to you is a very intense experience. You're hyper aware that if you make a mistake, you could hurt your friends and family.
You could bump into one of your investors at a birthday or a barbecue. I frequently did.
Nothing else focuses your mind like that.
Of course, in hindsight, that money also landed at a very interesting time, right as the Nasdaq was going parabolic... "everybody" was becoming a day-trader... and all stocks seemed to be making money.
In 1999 alone, dozens of big names – most of them Internet companies – rose 1,000% or more.
But Whitney – with his friends' and family's money on the line and the stress that carried – ignored practically all of these hot stocks... "Because I knew most of them were doomed," he says. Instead, Whitney put his investors' money into a group of stocks nobody was talking about.
Over the next two years, the Nasdaq crashed, and Whitney's fund beat the market in nearly every year of the decade that followed. He says his approach tripled his investors' money through both the 2000 crash and, later, the downturn of 2008.
His decision to pick a certain group of stocks "made me," Whitney said this morning.
Twenty-seven years later, the same 'window' is reopening...
Whitney ran through a list of companies this morning: Argan (AGX)... Tactile Systems Technology (TCMD)... Centerra Gold (CGAU)... Comfort Systems USA (FIX)... IES Holdings (IESC)... Fabrinet (FN)... Steel Dynamics (STLD)... XPEL (XPEL).
Most people have never heard of any of them.
But all of them have delivered triple-digit gains in recent years. And the "Magnificent Seven" that dominate the S&P 500 – seven big tech names most investors own either directly, through index funds, or both – have lagged lately.
(This year, an equal-weighted basket of those seven mega caps is up about 6%, while the "other 493" stocks in the S&P 500 are up closer to 15%.)
The stocks Whitney listed are from different sectors, with different business models, and have no obvious relationship to one another. That's his point...
On the surface, these stocks have nothing in common... But look closer, and there's a hidden connection binding all these companies together.
That connection is the screen that finds them... Only a handful of stocks ever pass it.
According to Whitney's research, the ones that do pass have beaten the broad market going back to 1957. In his own near-decadelong back test, they would have turned $100,000 into $1.1 million since 2017.
In the past 12 months alone, Whitney said, stocks that passed the test could have doubled your money or more 46 separate times. "History is repeating itself," he said, "and the window of opportunity is reopening again."
As he says, big tech stocks have been driving the market. But it's time to prepare for a new group of unknown names to take the lead. Investors who position themselves right could clear 1,000% returns.
Watch the replay at your convenience...
Whitney laid out the whole case this morning, including more about the one connection that ties those companies together. He also explains why it matters most in exactly this kind of market – one that recalls the riskiest stage of the dot-com bubble.
Just for tuning in, Whitney also shares his No. 1 stock to buy right now with viewers, free of charge, plus one big-name stock he says you should sell immediately.
If you missed the debut of Whitney's event, you can watch the replay right here. We urge you to do it.
The gears might already be in motion...
The market is losing steam...
Since hitting a fresh all-time high on August 13, the S&P 500's post-Iran rebound has stalled out. But even though the market is still within 2% of that all-time high, things aren't looking so good under the hood.
The Equal Weight S&P 500 also just fell below its 50-day moving average for the first time since April.
And on a shorter time frame, only about 20% of S&P 500 stocks are above their 20-day moving average. That's the lowest level since March, when the Nasdaq fell into correction territory and the broader market came within 1% of doing the same.
Put simply, the overall market may look like it's hanging in there. But the average stock is not doing as well.
Now, markets are looking for a catalyst for the next move...
As our colleague and Ten Stock Trader editor Greg Diamond told his readers on Tuesday, the "obvious" catalyst would be some kind of deal to cool the Iran conflict once again.
Yet again, that didn't look likely today...
Oil futures shot up – jumping about 6% – reacting to the latest war news.
Today, Iranian strikes damaged several U.S. fighter jets at a Jordanian military base. Meanwhile, the Houthis in Yemen seized a key Red Sea port, better positioning them to target ships exporting Saudi Arabian oil.
Meanwhile, backward-looking producer price index ("PPI") inflation numbers came in hot, at 5.4% year over year and 0.4% for the month.
The 2-year Treasury yield shot up about 15 basis points today to nearly 4.59%. That's up from around 4.15% just four weeks ago.
The 2-year Treasury is more sensitive to the federal-funds rate than longer-term U.S. government bonds. Investors expect the Federal Reserve to hike the fed-funds rate to tackle inflation... pushing down the value of existing Treasury bonds.
Even longer-dated U.S. debt is struggling...
The 10-year Treasury rose to 4.96% today, and the 30-year yield moved to 5.36% – its highest level since the summer of 2007.
And the next few days could bring more news that would keep the current trends going...
The August consumer price index ("CPI") release is on deck tomorrow, ahead of the Fed's next policy decision next week. All signs suggest it'll keep showing elevated inflation. If new Chair Kevin Warsh backs up what he says about being serious about inflation, the Fed may announce a rate hike.
After this morning's PPI report, fed-funds market odds on just that increased to more than 70%. And the market sees a 95% chance of at least one hike by the end of the year.
That's just the kind of pinprick that can upset a bull market of the frenzied type that has Whitney thinking of 1999. And it's why he's telling folks to prepare for what came next back then.
He sees the signs of it happening again. And Whitney's same playbook can help out again.
Get ready now if you haven't already.
New 52-week highs (as of 9/9/26): Abercrombie & Fitch (ANF), Alpha Architect 1-3 Month Box Fund (BOXX), Chevron (CVX), Dorchester Minerals (DMLP), Equinor (EQNR), Marathon Petroleum (MPC), Roivant Sciences (ROIV), USCF SummerHaven Dynamic Commodity Strategy No K-1 Fund (SDCI), Translational Development Acquisition (TDAC), Ternium (TX), Valero Energy (VLO), and State Street Energy Select Sector SPDR Fund (XLE).
In today's mailbag, feedback on yesterday's Digest, which included a prediction from an AI engineer at Anthropic about AI having a 10% chance of killing all humans... Do you have a comment or question? As always, e-mail us at feedback@stansberryresearch.com.
"Maybe, just maybe they should get all these AI know-it-alls, sit them down and have them watch Colossus: The Forbin Project. It didn't end well for Dr. Forbin either. (I would add the vocoder-style sound 'This is the voice of World Control' from the end as that AI blows people up to make a point. The end speech by the computer alone is worth the watch).
"Those movies and TV shows presaged cell phones and iPads (Star Trek, 2001: a Space Odyssey) among so many other things. This too?... Thanks for all your work." – Subscriber John H.
All the best,
Corey McLaughlin with Nick Koziol
Baltimore, Maryland
September 10, 2026