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The companion research report to Felix Prehn’s video, prepared by Goat Academy Research. Enter your email address and the report opens immediately.

A 16-page companion briefing to the video of the same title. In 11 days from late October to early November 2026 the plumbing of money broke in 7 countries. Paraguay's central bank shut Ueno Bank and about 3 million customers, roughly 6 in 10 adults, were frozen out, with the state guarantee paying back only up to about $38,200. In Japan a piece of communications kit failed and 128 of 236 shinkin banks sharing one system went dark in a single afternoon: 3,430 branches, cash machines, apps and transfers all down. Binance lost $6.3bn to a hack the FBI blames on North Korea, Crédit Mutuel Arkéa in France lost about €100m through an outside provider, Bank SinoPac in Taiwan had 419 accounts drained through a supplier's settings, South Korea reported 37 financial firms hit and the GOPAX exchange froze withdrawals. The report's point is that in almost every case the customers were made whole and the institution took the loss; what people lost was access, and the weak point was shared plumbing or an outside supplier rather than the bank's own front door. It explains why the IMF has put cyberattacks at the top of its risks to the whole system for the first time, why the G7 finance chiefs have agreed to rehearse an AI attack on the banking system, and why the GENIUS Act digital-dollar rules that switch on in January require issuers to be able to freeze tokens on a lawful order. It then sets out the 5-step access plan Felix Prehn uses himself: a cash buffer of about a month of essential spending, a second bank on a different system, a check of your deposit insurance ($250,000 per person, per bank, per account type in America), a paper copy of what you would need if the apps were dead, and the assumption of a scam wave after any big hack. The second half turns to the market getting it backwards: Palo Alto Networks and CrowdStrike each fell about 17% and Zscaler about 18% in the week to 5 November, in the middle of the biggest hacking wave on record, on a rival's slowing growth and a wider post-election tech sell-off rather than any fall in demand. It reads the cybersecurity funds out of the Winston app (IHAK, HACK, WCBR, BUG, CIBR, LOCK.L, ISPY.L, all 13% to 20% below their 52-week highs but still above their 200-day lines) and scores the shares, with Fortinet, Gen Digital and Qualys in the high 70s and 80s and Palo Alto, CrowdStrike and Cloudflare in the 30s and 40s on forward price-to-earnings ratios of 65 to 120. It is a watch list with dated triggers, not a buy list: Japan's megabank results on 13 November, Palo Alto earnings on 18 November, CrowdStrike and Zscaler on 1 to 2 December, the GENIUS Act taking effect on 18 January 2027 and the 200-day line. It argues against itself in a table of what could spoil it, closes with the real return of the US stock market by era after inflation (from +15.1% a year in 1985 to 1999 to −0.8% in 2000 to 2012) and the question of which decade you are standing in, and ends with a data room, sources and a pointer to one free live training. It is an educational explanation of a mechanism, not a recommendation to buy or sell anything.

Goat Academy is an online financial education institution founded by economist and former investment banker Felix Prehn.