Atlassian doubles in less than six months. Who's next?

In early April, NYSE: TEAM was down 75% from its all time highs, trading near US$56. Five months later, it's back above US$150. A gain of roughly 150% off the low. If you'd told most fund managers in April this was coming, they'd have laughed. So what changed and more importantly, who's next?

Source: Bloomberg August 2026. Past performance is no indication of future performance

The Atlassian story is a lesson in how fast a market narrative can flip. Through late 2025 and into early 2026, Atlassian became the perceived sacrificial lamb for "AI will kill software" fears. The idea that AI coding assistants would make tools like Jira and Confluence redundant. That fear deepened in March, when Atlassian cut 1,600 jobs, around a tenth of its workforce, to redirect spending toward AI. A move the market read as defensive rather than confident. Even a genuinely strong February quarter, Atlassian's first billion dollar cloud revenue quarter with 44% growth in remaining performance obligations, wasn't enough to stop the slide. By April, sentiment had bottomed out completely.

Source: Bloomberg August 2026. Past performance is no indication of future performance

What happened next was the opposite of the disruption story. Co-founder Mike Cannon Brookes argued publicly that AI needed somewhere to live and that Atlassian's platforms, sitting on years of enterprise workflow and knowledge data, were exactly that home. Atlassian leaned in, bundling AI coding agents, including a new Jira Coding Agent plus integrations with Claude Code, Cursor and GitHub Copilot, directly into its existing products at no extra cost. And the market got its proof on 6 August: a Q4 result that blew past expectations; solid revenue and cloud growth, and EPS exceeding expectations. With guidance pointing to accelerating cloud and subscription growth into FY27. The stock jumped more than 30% in two sessions. AI didn't kill Atlassian's business. It reignited it.

Source: Bloomberg August 2026.

A handful of ASX tech names have rebounded too, ASX: XRO and ASX: WTC among them, but the read through and magnitude isn't uniform. What separates the durable rebounds from the relief rallies is the same thing that separates Atlassian from its ASX peers. Genuine global revenue and earnings growth, not just a bounce with the broader market. Xero and WiseTech both derive meaningful revenue offshore. Further down the ASX tech ladder, smaller, domestically focused names with limited global reach are riding the same wave of sentiment without the same underlying earnings support. A much shakier place to be positioned if risk appetite turns again.

Source: Bloomberg August 2026. Past performance is no indication of future performance

For genuine technology growth, there's structurally only one market with the scale, capital depth and AI infrastructure build out to back it, the US. It's home to the vast majority of global AI capex, the world's largest venture and growth equity pools, and the deepest bench of specialist technology investors. It's also, not coincidentally, where Australia's own tech success stories, Atlassian among them chose to list, rather than the ASX.

Source: Bloomberg August 2026.

None of this means Australian technology can't participate, but the odds of picking the next Atlassian style rebound from a shallow, largely domestic universe are considerably lower than backing the market where structural AI winners are actually built. Over the long run, US technology has consistently rewarded investors who stayed the course through drawdowns like Atlassian's. The real risk is being in the wrong stock, or the wrong market, when the turn comes.

Which is exactly the argument for not trying to pick the next Atlassian at all. The ETFS Shares US Technology ETF ASX: WWWW provides investors exposure to a broad, liquid basket of the largest US technology companies. The same market driving this rebound without the single stock risk of betting on which one recovers first. It's also the lowest cost US technology focused ETF listed on the ASX. You don't need to have called Atlassian's bottom in April to benefit from where technology goes next.

Source: Bloomberg August 2026. Past performance is no indication of future performance