A financial bubble is, at its core, a collective illusion—an economic cycle driven more by emotion than by fundamentals. It begins with genuine innovation, accelerates through exaggerated expectations, and eventually collapses when reality supplants belief. Every bubble follows a recognisable life cycle: stealth phase, when early investors quietly accumulate positions; awareness phase, when institutional players join in; mania phase, when retail investors flood the market in fear of missing out; and finally, the blow-off phase, when prices crash under the weight of their own excesses. By every measurable indicator, the global artificial intelligence boom has entered the later stages of this cycle. The symptoms are textbook—soaring valuations, concentrated gains, speculative capital chasing the same narrative, and a feedback loop between hype and investment. The parallels with the dot-com era are too striking to ignore. Let’s start with the numbers. In 2024 alone, AI-related stock...