We Checked the Quantum Sector's One-Month Tape. IonQ, Rigetti and D-Wave Are Up, Not Down

by Arash Shirazi · August 16, 2026

Quantum Computing Correspondent, Frontier Tech Wire

Frontier Tech Wire set out this weekend to document a drawdown in the listed quantum-computing sector over the past month. The premise did not survive contact with the price data. Measured from mid-July to Friday, August 14's close, the three largest listed pure plays did not fall roughly 30%. They rose between roughly 26% and 33%.

Here are the pairs, with providers and both dates named. The closes come from the daily price-history tables at StockAnalysis.com and were checked line by line against a second provider, TipRanks, with Friday's closes confirmed separately at Yahoo Finance. IonQ (NYSE: IONQ) closed at $34.78 on Friday, July 17, 2026 and $46.26 on Friday, August 14: up $11.48, or 33.0%. Rigetti Computing (Nasdaq: RGTI) closed at $14.11 on July 17 and $18.82 on August 14: up $4.71, or 33.4%. D-Wave Quantum (Nasdaq: QBTS) closed at $16.73 and $21.17 on the same dates: up $4.44, or 26.5%. We computed each percentage ourselves.

A note on method, because this is exactly where the sector's coverage goes wrong. There is no single correct definition of "a month" in a price series, and a daily table read one row off will invert a story. An earlier version of this piece carried IonQ's July 17 close as $35.10. That is IonQ's July 16 close; July 17 is $34.78, a 0.91% decline from the prior session. Both providers agree on the pairing, and the corrected reading makes IonQ's month stronger, not weaker. The Rigetti and D-Wave July 17 closes matched at both providers on the first reading.

We also went looking for the decline claim itself and could not find its basis. No provider we checked shows a stamped series consistent with a 30% one-month decline in IONQ, RGTI or QBTS over any window ending Friday.

So where did the gains come from? The tape is unusually concentrated: almost the entire month's move lands in three sessions. On Monday, August 3, IonQ rose 6.61%, Rigetti 7.16% and D-Wave 10.51%. On Tuesday, August 4, they added 7.39%, 8.93% and 9.26%. On Friday, August 7, they gained 11.86%, 8.53% and 6.98%. Those are the providers' own daily change figures, and they agree. Compound those three days out of each stock's month and what remains across the other sixteen sessions is roughly plus 4% for IonQ, plus 5% for Rigetti and minus 2% for D-Wave — by our arithmetic, close to flat.

August 3 has an identifiable cause for two of the three, and we verified both rather than taking them secondhand. IonQ announced on Friday, July 31, 2026 that it had completed its acquisition of SkyWater Technology (Nasdaq: SKYT), which it describes as the largest exclusively U.S.-based semiconductor foundry. SkyWater shareholders received $15.00 in cash and 0.4883 shares of IonQ common stock per SkyWater share. August 3 was the first session after that announcement. One caveat on how much weight that can bear: the deal itself was announced earlier in 2026 and was already known to the market. What was new on July 31 was the closing.

Also on August 3, D-Wave announced an agreement with Nasdaq Verafin, the exchange operator's financial-crime detection arm. The release is explicit about scope, and the scope is modest: the collaboration will "begin with the development of a proof-of-concept (PoC), with the potential to expand to pilot applications for key anti-financial crime use cases," with Nasdaq Verafin exploring "the use of D-Wave's annealing quantum computing technology to uncover complex relationships across account activity, transaction patterns, and counterparty networks that conventional approaches may overlook." No dollar value, contract term or revenue commitment appears in it.

Both items check out. Neither explains why Rigetti rose 7.16% and then 8.93% alongside them. We found no Rigetti announcement we could date to either session; the company's own August 6 release refers to a recently announced expanded collaboration with Hewlett Packard Enterprise and the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center, and to a letter of intent with the U.S. Department of Commerce for up to $100 million in potential funding, but does not date either, and we could not tie either to August 3 or 4. That is the first sign that what moved this group was not company news.

Second-quarter results arrived earlier than the calendar might suggest — the first week of August, not the middle. IonQ reported on August 5: revenue of $80.1 million, up 287% year over year, with full-year 2026 guidance raised to between $280 million and $290 million. Its GAAP net loss attributable to IonQ was $1.87 billion, dominated by a single non-cash item. The release's income statement, presented in thousands, carries a loss on the change in fair value of warrant liabilities of $(1,649,115) thousand — that is $1,649.1 million, or about $1.65 billion, and it is a mark rather than a cash outflow. The shares fell 4.29% on August 5 and 0.53% on August 6.

Rigetti reported on August 6: revenue of $5.1 million and an operating loss of $28.1 million. Its GAAP net loss of $52.6 million likewise includes a large non-cash component — a $29.6 million change in the fair value of derivative warrant liabilities — which is why the GAAP loss exceeds the operating loss. Cash, cash equivalents and available-for-sale investments stood at $541.3 million as of June 30. "In the second quarter, we continued to execute on our strategy by focusing on our system performance, progressing our core technology roadmap, and broadening on-premises system deployments," said Dr. Subodh Kulkarni, Rigetti's chief executive officer. The stock closed down 1.49%.

D-Wave also reported on August 6, and it was the only one of the three to move hard on its own results: QBTS fell 9.28% that session while IonQ slipped 0.53% and Rigetti 1.49%. Per its release distributed via Business Wire, revenue was $3.1 million, "essentially flat" against $3.1 million a year earlier; bookings were $2.1 million, up 59% from $1.3 million; GAAP net loss was $48.0 million, or $0.13 per share; cash and marketable securities were $546.2 million as of June 30. The release attributes most of the year-over-year narrowing of the loss to a $142.0 million decrease in non-cash, non-operating charges related to the remeasurement of its warrant liability.

The largest up day of the month, August 7, is the one we cannot explain. All three rallied hard — IonQ most of all, at 11.86% on 31.08 million shares — a day after two of them had reported and none had announced anything new. We searched for a sector catalyst dated to that session and found none we could verify. Rather than reverse-engineer a story, we state plainly that the evidence does not support a causal account of August 7.

That correlation is the most defensible finding here. The three finished the month within seven percentage points of one another despite entirely different businesses and news flow — annealing hardware at D-Wave, trapped-ion systems and now a foundry at IonQ, superconducting systems at Rigetti — and their three biggest up days are the same three days. The only clearly idiosyncratic session in the sample is D-Wave's August 6 earnings drop. What the tape shows is a group moving together, which is consistent with sector positioning rather than company-specific execution.

One piece of housekeeping that trips up coverage of this beat: listing venues have changed recently and should be checked every time. D-Wave announced on July 14, 2026 that it was voluntarily transferring its listing from the New York Stock Exchange to Nasdaq, with trading on the new venue beginning July 27 — several outlets still carry QBTS as an NYSE symbol, and that is now wrong. IonQ's own August 5 release still identifies it as NYSE: IONQ; Rigetti's as Nasdaq: RGTI.

Finally, a distinction the one-month frame obscures. The absence of a one-month drawdown does not mean these shares sit at highs: IonQ's 52-week range is $25.89 to $84.64 at both StockAnalysis.com and Yahoo Finance, against the August 14 close of $46.26, on a horizon far longer than the one measured here. Conflating the two is how a "down 30%" figure ends up attached to the wrong window. We report the month we measured: from July 17 to August 14, this group went up.