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Editorial Advisory Board

  • Professor Andrea M. Armani, University of Southern California
  • Ruti Ben-Shlomi, Ph.D., LightSolver
  • James Butler, Ph.D., Hamamatsu
  • Natalie Fardian-Melamed, Ph.D., Columbia University
  • Justin Sigley, Ph.D., AmeriCOM
  • Professor Birgit Stiller, Max Planck Institute for the Science of Light, and Leibniz University of Hannover
  • Professor Stephen Sweeney, University of Glasgow
  • Mohan Wang, Ph.D., University of Oxford
  • Professor Xuchen Wang, Harbin Engineering University
  • Professor Stefan Witte, Delft University of Technology

Why IonQ (IONQ) Stock Is Trading Up Today

IONQ Cover Image

What Happened?

Shares of quantum computing company IonQ (NYSE: IONQ) jumped 4.8% in the morning session after the stock's positive momentum continued as a regulatory filing revealed that financial giant Morgan Stanley has taken a significant ownership stake in the company. 

According to a Schedule 13G form filed with the SEC, Morgan Stanley disclosed a 7.1% passive ownership stake, holding over 18.6 million shares of IonQ's common stock. Such a substantial investment from a major institutional investor often signals strong confidence in a company's future prospects, boosting investor sentiment. Adding to the positive momentum, IonQ recently announced that its intellectual property portfolio has surpassed 1,000 total patents and patent applications. This milestone reinforces the company's position as a leader in the trapped-ion quantum computing space.

After the initial pop the shares cooled down to $40.22, up 4.1% from previous close.

Is now the time to buy IonQ? Access our full analysis report here, it’s free.

What Is The Market Telling Us

IonQ’s shares are extremely volatile and have had 103 moves greater than 5% over the last year. In that context, today’s move indicates the market considers this news meaningful but not something that would fundamentally change its perception of the business.

The previous big move we wrote about was 7 days ago when the stock dropped 8.3% after investors took some profits off the table as markets awaited signals on future monetary policy from the Federal Reserve's Jackson Hole symposium later in the week. The downturn in the market was largely attributed to a significant sell-off in megacap tech and chipmaker shares. Nvidia, Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), and Broadcom all saw notable drops, dragging down the VanEck Semiconductor ETF. Other major tech-related companies like Tesla, Meta Platforms, and Netflix were also under pressure. 

A key reason for this trend is that much of the recent market gains have been concentrated in the "AI trade," which includes these large technology and semiconductor companies. So this could also mean that some investors are locking in some gains ahead of more definitive feedback from the Fed.

IonQ is down 6.7% since the beginning of the year, and at $40.22 per share, it is trading 21.2% below its 52-week high of $51.07 from January 2025. Investors who bought $1,000 worth of IonQ’s shares at the IPO in January 2021 would now be looking at an investment worth $3,724.

Today’s young investors won’t have read the timeless lessons in Gorilla Game: Picking Winners In High Technology because it was written more than 20 years ago when Microsoft and Apple were first establishing their supremacy. But if we apply the same principles, then enterprise software stocks leveraging their own generative AI capabilities may well be the Gorillas of the future. So, in that spirit, we are excited to present our Special Free Report on a profitable, fast-growing enterprise software stock that is already riding the automation wave and looking to catch the generative AI next.

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