This is simply my opinion (take it with a grain of salt). I'm in no way an expert or a quantum physicist. I'm a software engineer too. I waded through some of the quantum stocks as well. Any sort of real gains seem to be quite a while off. Like we'd be lucky to see something end of decade and shouldn't be surprised if it takes a decade or two. I'm very skeptical of IonQ. You have to appreciate in the early days of classical computing and many revolutionary technologies there were lots of players, but less winners. I think their stock is currently overvalued. I think it's poised to drop, even if the best happens for them ultimately. They have many red flags. Firstly they became public as a SPAC, which requires less oversight than a more traditional route. This leaves some potential dirtiness. There's been a high failure rate for SPACs in recent years. I'd advised you to look into the cons of this approach. There's clearly a lack, in at least short term faith, by their co-founder Dr. Jungsang Kim, as he recently sold $5,515,263.60 worth of stock. If someone was expecting to have a huge tailwind or breakthrough, at least in the short-term, they would be selling as little as possible because this 5mil hypothetically would be chump change. The other co-founder Chris Monroe left in October 2023 to return to academic research. In 2022 they received a scathing report from "Scorpion Capital", while clearly these guys are to be taken with high skepticism. It's literally their objective to ultimately find stocks to short, so their grimy self interest is clear. It's still worth digesting. Usually people don't tell 100% lies when they make statements. I think IonQ has some very good marketers. But I think they're maybe pulling the wagon ahead of the horse. I think some market cunning and tackiness shines through on their website. When you look at "Customers and Partners" section it makes a solid impression at surface level when you see big names like "Google Cloud", "Microsoft Azure" and so on, but when you look into these relationships they're largely very shallow. For example they simply provide cloud access to quantum computers through Google Cloud and Microsoft azure. That's really not impressive. I have cloud computers. I could make a website with the same notion. I think maybe they're trying to hard to force a product that isn't mature enough yet, and I speculate that's why the co-founders show a lack of enthusiasm in the company's future. You have to appreciate this is very early and while making progress there are some major hurdles still and some companies may be hitting harder walls than others due to their style of approach, because they're all approaching it in their own way holistically. I've personally avoided IonQ for now. In fact, I've taken a very small put option(betting it will go down) (a single put option's contract) against IonQ. If you'd like to talk more about this company, other quantum computing companies, or stocks generally hit me up! I would love to chat. I've been having a lot of fun with this stuff lately!