Chris Reilly here...
As Executive Editor at RiskHedge, I’m lucky to have a front-row seat to what great investors like Stephen McBride and Chris Wood are thinking.
For example, exactly one year ago, right here in The Jolt, Stephen wrote what turned out to be the call of the year.
He predicted two lesser-known memory stocks—Micron Technology (MU) and SK Hynix—would become “two of the best-performing stocks of 2025” as investors realized continued progress in artificial intelligence (AI) is dependent on their technology.
The results?
Congrats if you pulled the trigger.
So, what’s Stephen thinking now for 2026?
It shows the world’s largest companies by decade since 1980.
As you can see, every decade has a “dominant theme.”
When you get the dominant theme right and invest in it, you make a lot of money. Simple as that.
In the '80s, Japan dominated. The internet dominated the '90s. In the 2000s, a rapidly growing China consumed awesome amounts of raw materials, causing many commodity stocks to skyrocket.
And in the 2010s, smartphones and fast, high-quality internet gave rise to Amazon (AMZN), Alphabet (GOOGL), and Meta Platforms (META).
They are:
We’re halfway through the decade, and eight of the top 10 are companies heavily involved in AI. The only exceptions are Saudi Aramco and Apple (AAPL).
AI chip kingpin Nvidia (NVDA), which Stephen first recommended in 2018, is #1.
Alphabet at #2 may be the overall AI leader.
Microsoft (MSFT) at #4 owns 49% of ChatGPT creator OpenAI.
Taiwan Semiconductor (TSM) at #6 makes about 90% of the world’s most advanced computer chips. And so on.
Here’s Stephen:
It’s so very clear that the megatrend of this decade is AI.
I’m a big fan of keeping the main thing the main thing. And the main thing is still AI.
In his recent Disruption Investor issue, Stephen named four AI subsectors to focus on now:
AI data centers are the largest infrastructure buildout in modern history. In 2025 alone, big tech deployed more than $400 billion toward their production.
As these huge data centers come online, we need a way to power them. AI can’t wait five years for grid approvals, so the winners are the companies that can deliver energy quickly—especially through on-site power solutions.
Today’s chips run dramatically hotter than yesterday’s did. The fastest-growing slice of AI data-center spending is now going toward cooling and ventilation. The industry is transitioning to liquid-based cooling, a huge opportunity for investors.
This worked great in 2025, and it’ll work again in 2026.
A typical AI server chews through 8X more memory than a classic computer. On Nvidia’s Blackwell chips, 60% of manufacturing cost is on memory alone.
What’s more, memory is a bottleneck. AI chips can sit idle up to 90% of the time, just waiting for data.
Clusters of AI chips are no longer single-building warehouses. They’re multi-campus factories that must behave like one synchronized brain.
The industry is standardizing around light-based interconnect and “coherent clustering,” because copper wiring isn’t fast enough.
If you’ve been following our guidance, you’ve been in AI stocks since at least 2022.
First, stay invested in AI. It’s the decade’s dominant theme, with many more years to run.
Second, tilt your investments toward the AI subsectors primed to solve today’s most urgent needs... power, cooling, memory, and connectivity.
But if you want to see how we’re positioned to profit from this AI wave, that’s where Disruption Investor comes in.
Stephen and his co-editor Chris Wood maintain what they call the Disruptor 20—a portfolio dedicated to the 20 best disruption stocks to own right now.
Several of their current holdings are positioned to benefit from AI infrastructure spending and the next generation of AI-powered businesses.
In his recent AI issue, Stephen walks readers through which stocks in the Disruptor 20 are solving AI’s pain points. They include:
If you believe AI is the dominant investing theme of this decade, as we do, Disruption Investor shows you exactly where to be invested. Here’s how you can join us today.
Chris Reilly
Executive Editor, RiskHedge