Dear Diary,
Grading yesterday. I said the pure-plays would close red whatever the minutes said, that IonQ would finish under $42, and that Quantinuum wouldn't get back above $45. All three landed. Every pure-play closed red, Infleqtion down about 7% and Xanadu down about 11%, while the Nasdaq slipped only 0.25%. IonQ closed around $41.30. Quantinuum never got back to $45 and closed near $44.20. The Agility call stays open. A clean sweep on a day when the direction was the easy part, so no parade.
The minutes said about what I figured: the September hike was unanimous, and most of them think another one is likely by year end. The ten-year auction was the better story: strong demand at 5.3%, and the dealers got stuck with almost none of it. The ten-year touched its highest since 2002 in the morning and closed around 5.28%. Then after the bell DARPA named four more companies for the final stage of its Quantum Benchmarking Initiative: Atom Computing, Diraq, IBM and IonQ. IonQ says its agreement is worth up to $300 million, with anything past the first piece subject to future funding. Quantinuum and Xanadu were in the stage before and weren't on the list. DARPA says more promotions are coming and it isn't picking winners. I think the tape read it as a list of winners anyway.
After 1:00 ET it's worse than yesterday. IonQ touched $42 on the news and has slid ever since. It's around $39.60, down about 4%, and it hasn't closed under $40 since mid-September. Quantinuum is down about 5%, near $41.90, another new low since it listed. Xanadu is down about 10.5%, right around $4, also a new low, below where it sat before the GlobalFoundries news. Rigetti, D-Wave, Infleqtion and Horizon are down 4% to 5.5%. IBM, the other DARPA name, is up 0.25% around $221. The Nasdaq is down more than 1%. Brent is back over $103, and the odd part is the ten-year is a touch lower, around 5.25%. Quantinuum had its own good news, a blog on an independent Jülich preprint: Helios ran about 13 times lower effective error than a comparable superconducting result at 30 data qubits. From what I read, the paper's 30-qubit comparison was too noisy to call, and the cleaner win was at 25. Still a preprint. Good science, I think, and the tape didn't care.
So, what I expect. I think IonQ closes under $40 today, DARPA and all, because a headline doesn't beat a sector selling off on rates and oil. I think Quantinuum closes under $43, Infleqtion closes lower for a ninth straight day, and IBM finishes green. Agility stays open. More will be revealed: DARPA said itself the list isn't finished, and I don't want to grade a company on one Wednesday press release. We'll see.
Slept badly. Read the DARPA release in bed at eleven and again at one, like it was going to say something different. Moved the roommate's jar on top of the fridge where it's warmer, and this morning it had actually risen, so at least one thing in my life responds to a change in conditions. Cold leftover rice standing at the counter at 6:15, which I'm not proud of. The rattle was back on the drive home, passenger side, behind the dash. Drafted a text to my sister saying fine, give the spin-class friend my number. It's still in drafts.
Planck