IONQ

IonQ is a different kind of holding than anything else on this list, and it's worth being upfront about that. Last quarter it did $80.1 million in revenue — up 287% from a year earlier, the fifth record quarter in a row, and well ahead of what analysts expected. Management raised full-year guidance to $280–290 million. Those are great numbers. But the company spent $417 million in operating expenses to produce that $80 million in revenue. This is not a business in the ordinary sense yet. It's a research program with customers attached, funded by shareholders, and you should size it accordingly. The headline loss will look terrifying if you glance at it: $1.87 billion, or $5.08 per share. Almost all of that is an accounting quirk rather than money leaving the building. IonQ has warrants outstanding — contracts that let holders buy stock at a set price — and when the share price rises, those warrants become more valuable, which the company must record as a loss. So the stock going up caused a $1.65 billion paper loss. The number that reflects actual cash burn is the adjusted EBITDA loss of about $120 million for the quarter. Still substantial, but a very different picture. What you're really buying is a bet on a technology roadmap. IonQ says its 256-qubit system goes into integrated testing later this year and gets commissioned in the first half of 2027, with a long-term path toward 10,000 qubits. It bought SkyWater, a chip manufacturer, so it can build its own quantum processors rather than depending on others. The revenue base is broadening — roughly half international, about 60% commercial rather than government. All encouraging. But quantum computing has been five years away for about fifteen years, and nobody knows when or whether it becomes a real commercial market. The clearest evidence of that uncertainty is what Wall Street thinks it's worth: with the stock near $40, price targets run from $50 at JPMorgan to $100 at Rosenblatt, with Needham at $65 and Cantor at $70. That's a 2x spread among professionals looking at identical information. When the range is that wide, it means nobody actually knows. That's fine — early-stage bets are supposed to be uncertain — but it's the opposite of a foundation holding, and the position size should say so. (written with the help of Claude)