IonQ's 12% Pullback in a Month: Simply a Correction or Time to Sell?

IonQ’s IONQ stock stumbled over the past 30 days, sliding 12.2% even as the S&P 500 edged up 1.1%. However, many market watchers see this pullback as a healthy correction after the outsized rally earlier in 2025. In other words, the decline says more about investor profit-taking than it does about IonQ’s fundamentals.

Let's delve deeper.

One-Month Share Comparison

During this period, the stock also underperformed the industry and sector’s 7.1% decline and 0.5% gain, respectively. IONQ’s peers, Rigetti Computing RGTI and D-Wave Quantum QBTS, declined 30.2% and 19.2% respectively, in this period.

The third-quarter 2025 earnings call and IONQ’s recent announcements highlight a growing business. IonQ closed the third quarter with record contracted bookings. The company expanded federal engagements through new government research contracts and strengthened enterprise adoption with additional Fortune 100 customers running early production-grade workloads.  The company also confirmed it remains on track to deliver its next-generation systems built on modular trapped-ion architectures and enhanced error-suppression techniques.

Recent updates show IonQ forming more partnerships in areas like AI, materials simulation and national research programs, strong signs that real commercial uses for quantum computing are getting closer. And even though the stock has dropped sharply, IonQ still has solid visibility into multi-year revenues, continued support from government agencies and large enterprise customers, and a growing lead in its trapped-ion hardware technology.

Financial Strength

IonQ’s strong balance sheet positions the company ahead of D-Wave and Rigetti. IonQ now has a huge financial advantage, with $3.5 billion in cash and no debt, thanks to two big fundraises, a $1 billion premium raise in the third quarter and a $2 billion follow-on offering in October.

This gives the company the strongest balance sheet in the quantum industry. With this money, IonQ can buy more companies like Oxford Ionics and Vector Atomic, speeding up its research efforts, building larger and more reliable manufacturing using semiconductor-style supply chains and expanding into key regions like Europe, Asia-Pacific, India and the Middle East.

Meanwhile, for IONQ, the Zacks Consensus Estimate for 2026 loss per share of $1.74 implies a 66.2% improvement from 2025. The estimated figure for 2026 revenues is pegged at $182.5 million, implying 68.9% estimated growth from the year-ago period.

Lofty Valuation

IonQ’s forward 12-month price/sales (P/S) ratio of 95.5 is far above the industry average, as you can see below.

However, the stock remained undervalued compared to D-Wave’s P/S of 219.88X and Rigetti’s P/S of 384.51X.

Hold IONQ Now

IONQ’s expanding customer base and exceptional balance sheet support a compelling long-term growth story, but its lofty valuation and recent share pullback introduce near-term uncertainty. With a Zacks Rank #3 (Hold), the most prudent move for investors is to wait, allowing the stock to stabilize, letting upcoming milestones and revenue traction play out and avoiding decisions driven by short-term market swings. You can see the complete list of today’s Zacks #1 Rank (Strong Buy) stocks here.

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This article originally published on Zacks Investment Research (zacks.com).

Zacks Investment Research