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Forbes
3 days ago
- Business
- Forbes
What's Behind The 400% Rise In IONQ Stock?
CANADA - 2025/05/09: In this photo illustration, the IonQ logo is seen displayed on a smartphone ... More screen. (Photo Illustration by Thomas Fuller/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images) IonQ Inc. (NYSE: IONQ), a company specializing in quantum computing, has witnessed its stock price rise dramatically by 400% over the past twelve months. This surge demonstrates an increasing interest in quantum computing, a domain that has the capacity to transform multiple industries. Unlike traditional computers that operate on binary bits, quantum computers utilize qubits that can exist in various states at the same time. This core distinction enables them to conduct complex calculations and manage extensive data by examining numerous potential outcomes simultaneously. The scope of quantum computing applications is wide-ranging, encompassing everything from financial modeling and drug discovery to materials science. Nevertheless, despite its potential, quantum computing encounters a major obstacle: the frequency of errors increases as systems become more intricate with higher qubit counts. This characteristic renders the technology inherently unstable, which is typical for emerging advanced technologies. Nonetheless, substantial progress is being made. Firms like Google, IBM, and IonQ have shown the capability to create scalable quantum computers with dozens of qubits, a pivotal advancement toward practical uses. IBM is at the forefront of this field, featuring its 1,121-qubit Condor processor and plans to develop systems with 100,000 qubits by 2033. IonQ has also introduced new quantum systems, such as Forte, which provides software configurability and versatility for researchers. However, if you are seeking potential gains with a more stable investment than an individual stock, you might want to explore the High Quality portfolio, which has surpassed the S&P and achieved >91% returns since its establishment. Additionally, see – Nvidia Stock's 1 Big Risk IonQ provides a variety of quantum computing solutions, including high-performance quantum computers and networking systems. These are available through cloud platforms and direct agreements, such as Amazon Braket, Azure Quantum, and IonQ's own Quantum Cloud. IonQ's unique method employs trapped ions as quantum bits. They specifically utilize ionized ytterbium atoms, which are ionized by removing an electron using lasers in a technique also known as 'trapping.' These ions are held steady by a specialized chip. IonQ's product lineup features IonQ Forte – a 36-qubit quantum computer tailored for commercial and research purposes. An enterprise edition is also offered. Additionally, they provide IonQ Aria: – a 25-qubit quantum computer available through the cloud. The company plans to introduce Tempo later this year, aimed at large enterprises and governmental bodies, featuring 99.9% fidelity. Recently, IonQ's management drew comparisons between their enterprise and Nvidia within the quantum computing landscape, which has further fueled investor enthusiasm. While quantum computing holds immense potential, it is still in a developmental phase and is not yet prepared for widespread practical usage. IonQ's revenue of $43 million over the past twelve months is relatively modest, and the company reported an operating loss of $255 million during that same timeframe. IonQ's stock is particularly vulnerable to negative market conditions, exhibiting significantly greater volatility than the overall market. For example, amid the inflation shock of 2022, IonQ's value dropped by 90%, while the S&P 500 recorded a peak-to-trough decline of 25.4%. Similarly, during the market correction induced by the COVID-19 pandemic, IonQ saw a 51% decrease in value from its peak, contrasting sharply with the benchmark index's 34% decline. This trend underscores the substantial risk of IonQ's stock declining in unfavorable market circumstances. Like many stocks in the quantum computing sector, IONQ represents a high-risk, high-reward investment opportunity. Key elements affecting its direction include ongoing technological advancements and cost management. IonQ could potentially sell many quantum computers in the upcoming years, which might contribute to further increases in its stock price. For investors, backing IonQ equates to supporting the future possibilities of quantum computing and IonQ's role in that future. The company stands out as one of the few providing high-fidelity quantum computing through platforms like Amazon Braket and has significant clients including Hyundai, Airbus, and Dow. As technology progresses, we can anticipate enhanced precision from a wider array of firms in the quantum computing sphere. Reflecting on its previous performance, IONQ stock has exhibited considerable volatility when juxtaposed with the broader markets. The stock returns were 55% in 2021, -79% in 2022, 259% in 2023, and 237% in 2024. In contrast, the Trefis High Quality (HQ) Portfolio, comprising 30 stocks, has displayed much less volatility and has comfortably outperformed the S&P 500 over the last four years. What accounts for this? On average, HQ Portfolio stocks yielded superior returns with lower risk compared to the benchmark index, providing a less tumultuous investment experience, as shown in HQ Portfolio performance metrics.
Yahoo
22-05-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Stock-Split Watch: Is IonQ Next?
IonQ is a pioneer in the field of quantum computing. Several tech stocks have split their stocks recently, such as Palo Alto Networks and Super Micro Computer. Shares of IonQ are down about 16% since the start of 2025. 10 stocks we like better than IonQ › After several leading tech companies executed stock splits in 2024 -- such as Palo Alto Networks and Super Micro Computer -- many investors have searched for clues indicating whether additional tech stocks will also choose to split their stocks in 2025. Soaring more than 520% over the past three years, a pioneer in quantum computing, IonQ (NYSE: IONQ), is one such popular tech stock that's drawing investor interest right now as a potential stock split candidate. But does the stock's impressive rise necessarily mean that management is preparing for a stock split in the near future? Let's take a closer look at the likelihood that IonQ will soon appear on the stock split calendar. Before examining how likely it is that IonQ will split its stock, it's good to take a step back and review why the stock has soared so much in the first place. Over the past three years, IonQ has made tremendous strides in growing its business -- something that the market has rewarded considerably -- with the launches of its Aria and Forte quantum computers. After reporting revenue of $1.4 million in 2021, IonQ booked sales of $43.1 million in 2024, and it projects continued growth in 2025. Should the company achieve the midpoint of its 2025 sales guidance, it will mean that the company has grown sales at a compound annual growth rate of 170% from 2021 through 2025. It's not just at the top of the income statement where IonQ has enjoyed success. IonQ has grown its gross profit from $1.1 million in 2021 to $22.5 million in 2024, averaging a gross profit margin of 59.9% during the four-year period. Many investors are highly motivated to identify potential stock splits, believing that if they buy shares before the stock splits -- in the case of forward stock splits at least -- they will be in a better position financially with the larger number of shares that they then own after the split takes effect. Experienced investors, however, know that this logic is faulty. Just as your dividing a slice of pizza into thirds doesn't give you three times as much pizza as your original slice, you will have more shares after a forward stock split, but there's no change in the value of your investment. So why do companies split their stocks? There are a variety of reasons, though most frequently it's because the share prices have risen to points that may preclude investors from buying a share. Understanding this, investors who are investigating IonQ will likely conclude that with shares rising as high as about $55 over the past year and trading around $35 as of this writing, it's highly unlikely that management will deem it necessary to implement a stock split. To put IonQ and a potential stock split in perspective, take the aforementioned Palo Alto Networks and Super Micro Computer stocks. Before they split their stocks last year, they were both trading near $400 per share. With the prospect of a stock split off the table, investors may wonder if it's still a reasonable time to click the buy button on IonQ stock. Since the company doesn't generate positive net income, traditional valuation metrics are unhelpful, but with shares plunging about 16% year to date, it seems that today provides a better opportunity than the start of the year. Of course, those interested in a position should perform their due diligence before making a final decision. Before you buy stock in IonQ, consider this: The Motley Fool Stock Advisor analyst team just identified what they believe are the for investors to buy now… and IonQ wasn't one of them. The 10 stocks that made the cut could produce monster returns in the coming years. Consider when Netflix made this list on December 17, 2004... if you invested $1,000 at the time of our recommendation, you'd have $642,582!* Or when Nvidia made this list on April 15, 2005... if you invested $1,000 at the time of our recommendation, you'd have $829,879!* Now, it's worth noting Stock Advisor's total average return is 975% — a market-crushing outperformance compared to 172% for the S&P 500. Don't miss out on the latest top 10 list, available when you join . See the 10 stocks » *Stock Advisor returns as of May 19, 2025 Scott Levine has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool recommends Palo Alto Networks. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy. Stock-Split Watch: Is IonQ Next? was originally published by The Motley Fool
Daily Mail
17-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Daily Mail
Olga Polizzi is still going strong at her family's expanding Forte hotels empire
Olga Polizzi says with a wry smile that she has always been defined in relation to her famous family – the Forte hotel dynasty. As a young woman, she was known as the daughter of patriarch Charles, who founded the empire. After that, she was the sister of Rocco Forte, who runs the luxury hotel group of that name, where she is head of design and a significant investor. More recently, her identity is as the mother of Alex Polizzi, of Channel 5 TV series The Hotel Inspector. 'I was my father's daughter, then my brother's sister and now I am my daughter's mother,' she laughs. Feminists might object to a woman being seen primarily through her relationship to others. But Polizzi is such a powerful force she can afford to take it lightly. She is director of design and deputy chair of Rocco Forte Hotels, which she helped create. She also has three hotels of her own: the Tresanton in Cornwall, the Endsleigh in Dartmoor, Devon, and The Star, in Alfriston, East Sussex, near her home. All this, as she approaches her 80th birthday – she exudes the vitality of a much younger woman. Charles Forte, who died in 2007 aged 98, emigrated to the UK as a child but remained a traditional Italian male. It seems never to have entered his head that he could have chosen a daughter to succeed him. He made Rocco chief executive of the Forte Group, then a FTSE 100 company, in 1983 and handed the chairmanship to his son a decade later. Did Polizzi ever wish she had been given the chance? 'Well, not really,' she says. 'I was never brought up like that and it wasn't on offer. It was Rocco and five sisters, so it was always the little prince. Rocco was always meant to follow on. 'We daughters were going to marry someone and they were going to look after us, that was it.' She did get married, in 1966, to Count Alessandro Polizzi, an Italian marquess, and the couple had two daughters, Alex and Charlotte. But in 1980 he died. 'I had these two small daughters and their father was killed in a car crash,' she says. 'Then my father said... you've got to work.' She joined the family business, on the building and design side. In the 1990s, she and her brother found themselves in the throes of a hostile takeover. Losing the family business to the predatory Granada leisure and TV group riles Polizzi even now, as it does Rocco. 'It was ghastly, I was so upset and so angry. It still rankles. I hated them,' she says, adding of the late boss of Granada who led the bid: 'I did an Italian incantation against Gerry Robinson.' Granada no longer exists, but her family business lives on in Rocco Forte Hotels, founded in the aftermath. Its high-end properties include Brown's in London's Mayfair, where I meet Polizzi, The Balmoral in Edinburgh and the Hotel de Russie in Rome. Family firms like theirs, she says, 'is how Italy keeps going'. 'The country is always nearly bust but these businesses carry on,' she says. 'Would the UK be stronger if there were more family firms? Yes, I really think so.' Italian prime minister Giorgia Meloni is, in Polizzi's view, 'the only good leader in Europe'. As for British politics, she says: 'I was cross with the Conservatives, but I am even more cross with this lot.' Labour, she says, is 'kicking business to death' with the increase in employers' National Insurance contributions. And Chancellor Rachel Reeves' decision to scrap the winter fuel allowance for pensioners strikes her as insane. 'I was getting it – I pay a lot of tax so it was quite nice – but I would have been very happy to send it back,' she says. But of those who need it, she adds: 'To take it away from other people is just mad. Every Labour government has been a disaster and they have always left us on our knees.' The strength of her bond with Rocco was forged in childhood, when, as the two eldest, they were often thrown together. 'I sometimes have different ideas from Rocco, but I know who's the boss,' she says. 'I trust my brother absolutely and I bend over backwards to help him.' Do they disagree on style? 'On the whole, we have the same taste though he is a bit more glitzy,' she says. Her design credo is to combine luxury with comfort and a sense of place. Not for her the formulaic hotel chains, where rooms are the same anywhere in the world. 'I want people to wake up in our hotel in Florence and know they are in Florence. I try to use local artisans and materials,' she says. 'Everyone is copying us in terms of sense of place.' How does she reconcile retaining individuality with creating an atmosphere that is identifiably Rocco Forte? 'We want to keep the names of the hotels, because some are famous,' she says. 'Subliminally, I try to put in RF on the towels and bits and pieces, but it probably isn't enough. 'Rocco, because he is recognised a lot, doesn't believe people don't know all the hotels are ours. It matters, because if people like one, they will want to stay in another Rocco Forte.' There are openings planned in Milan, Naples and Sicily. Business was always part of family life. Polizzi says: 'When my father came back in the evening, he would put his finger on the front bell and not take it off until the door was open. We would hear ring, ring, ring and would have to rush downstairs to greet him. 'When we were a certain age we would have dinner with him and talk business. There was always a mass of people around him. He always had acolytes, everywhere.' She is less gregarious than her father or second husband, the writer Sir William Shawcross, whom she married in 1993. She says: 'William is very much a people person. I am not, though I don't want to use the word shy because it is a bit stupid at my age.' She would rather not draw attention to her approaching 80th. Like Rocco, who is slightly older, and was doing triathlons into his 60s, the years have been kind. 'We do have a lot of energy,' she muses. As for retirement: 'I've got a lovely family and a lovely husband, but I have never been a home bod. I'm so used to getting up and going to work. I'm just not a lady who lunches. 'Now I am older I would like to have more days off, but somehow or other it doesn't happen.'
Business Insider
17-05-2025
- Business
- Business Insider
Maxim Group Sticks to Their Buy Rating for ReposiTrak (TRAK)
In a report released yesterday, Tom Forte from Maxim Group reiterated a Buy rating on ReposiTrak (TRAK – Research Report). The company's shares closed yesterday at $22.41. Confident Investing Starts Here: Quickly and easily unpack a company's performance with TipRanks' new KPI Data for smart investment decisions Receive undervalued, market resilient stocks straight to you inbox with TipRanks' Smart Value Newsletter According to TipRanks, Forte is a 4-star analyst with an average return of 8.4% and a 46.41% success rate. Forte covers the Consumer Cyclical sector, focusing on stocks such as Beyond Inc, Light & Wonder, and Jakks Pacific. The analyst consensus on ReposiTrak is currently a Hold rating. TRAK market cap is currently $409.6M and has a P/E ratio of 69.01. Based on the recent corporate insider activity of 37 insiders, corporate insider sentiment is negative on the stock. This means that over the past quarter there has been an increase of insiders selling their shares of TRAK in relation to earlier this year.
Yahoo
05-05-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Down 45%, Should You Buy the Dip on IonQ?
The quantum computing specialist has grown rapidly since its public debut. Its computing power is increasing as it rolls out more powerful systems. But a bit too much of its future growth is baked into its current valuation. IonQ (NYSE: IONQ), a provider of quantum computing systems and cloud-based services, went public by merging with a special purpose acquisition company (SPAC) on Oct. 1, 2021. The combined company's stock started trading at $10.60 per share, then endured some wild swings before closing at a record high of $51.07 on Jan. 6, 2025. At the time, investors were impressed by IonQ's early mover's advantage in the quantum computing market and its rapid growth. President Donald Trump's victory in last November's U.S. election also sparked a buying frenzy in pricier growth stocks. Where to invest $1,000 right now? Our analyst team just revealed what they believe are the 10 best stocks to buy right now. Continue » Yet, IonQ's stock has plunged about 45% since then. The bulls retreated as the Trump Administration's "Liberation Day" tariffs rattled the markets and stoked fears of a recession. It also became increasingly difficult to justify its sky-high valuations. So should investors consider IonQ's pullback to be a buying opportunity, or a grim warning of darker days ahead? Traditional computers, even those running the fastest CPUs, store their data in binary bits of zeros and ones. Quantum computers store zeros and ones simultaneously in "qubits," so they can process larger amounts of data at a much faster rate. However, quantum computers are also larger, consume more power, and are much pricier than traditional servers and mainframes. They also make a higher percentage of mistakes. Due to those limitations, they're still mainly used by universities and government agencies for niche research projects, instead of for mainstream computing tasks. IonQ sells three quantum computers: Its older Aria system, its flagship Forte system, and its data center-oriented Forte Enterprise system. It plans to roll out its fourth system, the Tempo, later this year. All its systems use a "trapped ion" technology that isolates individual ions (charged atoms) with electromagnetic fields in a vacuum chamber. It claims that this process is more accurate and power-efficient than other competing methods like superconducting qubits and photonic qubits. IonQ also serves up its quantum computing power as a cloud-based service for customers that want to develop quantum applications without installing on-premise systems. IonQ measures its quantum computing power in algorithmic qubits (AQ). Both versions of Forte reached 36 AQ at the end of 2024. It expects Tempo to achieve 64 AQ by using barium ions instead of ytterbium ions to improve its stability. That means IonQ remains on track to achieve its ambitious long-term goal of generating 64 AQ in 2025, 256 AQ in 2026, 384 AQ in 2027, and 1,024 AQ in 2028. It also expects its gate fidelity (its error detection rate) to rise from 99.9% in 2024 to 99.95% in 2028 as it rolls out its more advanced systems. From 2021 to 2024, IonQ's annual revenue surged from $2 million to $43 million. That growth trajectory was impressive, but it still significantly missed its own pre-merger estimates. Metric 2021 2022 2023 2024 Original Revenue Forecast (in millions) $5 $15 $34 $60 Actual Revenue (in millions) $2 $11 $22 $43 Data source: IonQ. The unexpected departure of its chief science officer, Dr. Chris Monroe, also rattled its investors in late 2023. However, IonQ continued to roll out new systems, sign new government and enterprise contracts, and acquire some of its smaller competitors. It even integrated Nvidia's parallel computing platform CUDA (Compute Unified Device Architecture) into its own quantum systems to support the integration of the chipmaker's AI-oriented GPUs. From 2024 to 2027, analysts expect IonQ's revenue to grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 88% to $290 million. But with a market capitalization of $6.56 billion, IonQ is already valued at 23 times its estimated sales for 2027. It also isn't expected to break even anytime soon. The quantum computing market could expand at a CAGR of 28.5% from 2025 to 2035, according to Market Research Future. If IonQ merely matches that growth rate, its revenue could grow from an estimated $85 million in 2025 to $939 million in 2035. That would be an impressive growth trajectory, but too much of its growth is baked into its current valuations. Even if its stock were cut in half, it would still be considered expensive relative to its growth. That might be why its insiders sold more than twice as many shares as they bought over the past three months, and why 18% of its float was being shorted in mid-April. IonQ might be worth nibbling on as a speculative play on the nascent quantum computing market, but investors shouldn't assume it won't drop even lower. In short, it's too early to consider its recent pullback to be a great buying opportunity. Before you buy stock in IonQ, consider this: The Motley Fool Stock Advisor analyst team just identified what they believe are the for investors to buy now… and IonQ wasn't one of them. The 10 stocks that made the cut could produce monster returns in the coming years. Consider when Netflix made this list on December 17, 2004... if you invested $1,000 at the time of our recommendation, you'd have $623,685!* Or when Nvidia made this list on April 15, 2005... if you invested $1,000 at the time of our recommendation, you'd have $701,781!* Now, it's worth noting Stock Advisor's total average return is 906% — a market-crushing outperformance compared to 164% for the S&P 500. Don't miss out on the latest top 10 list, available when you join . See the 10 stocks » *Stock Advisor returns as of April 28, 2025 Leo Sun has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Nvidia. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy. Down 45%, Should You Buy the Dip on IonQ? was originally published by The Motley Fool Sign in to access your portfolio
