2026 is starting to look like 2008. Wall Street is buying insurance against an AI crash, and it's buying a lot of it. Most investors aren’t aware right now of what’s going on, but this matters for every tech and AI stock you own. The insurance is called a credit default swap. It pays out if a company can't pay its debts - the same contract that became famous in the 2008 financial crisis. In July, investors traded under $2B a week of this insurance on Oracle, Nvidia, Meta, Amazon, Alphabet, Broadcom and SpaceX. By September, it was over $9B a week. The reason is debt. AI companies have borrowed $466B so far this year to build out data centers (at this point last year, it was $101B). And the price of that protection is hitting records - insuring Meta's and Nvidia's debt has never cost more. For Oracle, the cost has more than doubled since January. CoreWeave is the extreme case. Insuring $10M of its debt costs $1.82M upfront, plus $125K every quarter. Some of its bonds already trade at distressed levels. The cracks are spreading. SoftBank fell 6% overnight as the cost of insuring its debt hit a 4-year high. In Korea, the biggest IPO on the tech exchange this year, a data center company, crashed 33% on its first day. Meanwhile, regular investors are doing the opposite. Nearly $10B poured into leveraged ETFs last week, the most on record, and $7B of it went into a fund that bets 3x on chip stocks. But I don't think this is a bubble. These AI companies are growing earnings 30% a year, and the market trades at 19 times earnings, nowhere near the 25 times we saw before the 2000 crash. But when the smart money starts paying up for protection, sentiment is without doubt shifting. Higher rates and higher energy prices make all that borrowing a lot more expensive. So keep cash on the sidelines. You're going to get to buy a lot of these AI stocks back 25-30% lower. Be patient, and you'll probably do very well over the next couple of years…