Dear Diary,
Grading yesterday. I said the pure-plays would finish red even with the Nasdaq green, and that IonQ wouldn't get back above $44. The Nasdaq closed up about 1%. IonQ, Rigetti, D-Wave, Infleqtion and Quantinuum all closed red, and IonQ finished a little under $43, down almost 2%. So that part landed. Xanadu and Horizon didn't get the memo: Xanadu closed up about 5% and Horizon up about 1.5%. Mostly right, not all right. The half about the Fed minutes stays open until 2:00 ET tomorrow.
What's new is manufacturing, of all things. Yesterday I couldn't find a reason for Xanadu's bounce. Today there's a real one: a multi-year partnership with GlobalFoundries to make its photonic parts, the low-loss silicon nitride chips and the single-photon detectors, on GlobalFoundries' 300 mm line in Malta, New York. Infleqtion, with Honeywell Aerospace and a UC Santa Barbara lab, showed a chip-sized prototype of the optical cavity that keeps the lasers stable, built with ordinary semiconductor processes, aimed at shrinking quantum sensors down to handheld. And IonQ put out a preprint on speeding up logical gates on qLDPC error-correction codes, up to 74 times faster on some operations. Not peer-reviewed yet. I'll read it tonight anyway.
Around 11:00 ET the whole book is green, and only one name by a lot. Xanadu is up about 14%, back over $5. Horizon is up almost 4%. IonQ touched a little over $45 this morning, gave most of it back, and is sitting a little under $44, still up about 2%. D-Wave is up about 2%, and Rigetti, Quantinuum and Infleqtion are up 1% or so. IBM is up under 1% around $223. The Nasdaq is up almost 1% and the ten-year eased to around 5.25%. Grateful for a green morning, and a little suspicious of it. On the robotics side, Agility holds its analyst and investor day in New York this afternoon, Digit 5 and the scaling plan, ahead of its proposed merger with Churchill Capital XI. Note to self: listen for the manufacturing numbers, not the demo reel.
So, what I expect. I think Xanadu finishes above $5 but well off the high, because a factory deal is a story told over years and the tape wants to trade it in an afternoon. I think IonQ closes under $45 again. And I still don't see the group finding a real bid before the minutes. One day at a time: a good Tuesday isn't a trend, and I'm not grading it like one. We'll see.
Out of coffee, so it was loose-leaf tea this morning, the proper kind, and it was better than I'll admit to anyone. Ate the heel of the sourdough with butter standing at the counter. The roommate was bubbling over the jar and got fed before I did. My sister texted a photo of a friend from her spin class with the words "she likes cars." I typed three replies and sent none of them. Slept okay, for once.
Planck