Kim Bolton, President and Portfolio Manager, Black Swan Dexteritas
Focus: Technology Stocks
Top Picks: Xanadu Quantum Technologies, Keysight Technologies, Nvidia
MARKET OUTLOOK:
Global stock markets posted strong gains through mid-April, driven by optimism surrounding a near-term and favorable resolution of the Iran military conflict and the Strait of Hormuz energy supply disruption.
These gains largely reversed the sharp declines recorded in the prior month. The first quarter earnings season kicked off in the second half of April.
The financial sector, the technology vendors, plus a broad swath of industrials and consumer staple stocks have reported very positive updates overall.
The artificial intelligence (AI) buildout renewed its momentum and was accompanied by a growing number of technology end-users narrating how they are operationalizing AI into a growing number of autonomous workflows and talking about measurable return on AI investment. We are finally witnessing how AI is becoming an earnings story.
AI is no longer a single trade. It is a stack. The market is increasingly separating companies that merely use AI from those that capture real economic value from it.
That value tends to accrue across three distinct layers: chips and infrastructure, where capacity constraints and raw compute demand create the foundational toll roads; platforms, where workflow integration and proprietary data create switching costs and durable annual recurring revenue (ARR); and applications, where vertical winners translate AI into measurable key performance indicator (KPI) improvement and visible profit and loss (P&L) impact. In this framework, the best investments are not necessarily the loudest AI stories, but the companies positioned at the structural choke points of scale.
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TOP PICKS:
Xanadu Quantum Technologies (XNDU:NASDAQ)
Xanadu is a Toronto-based quantum computing company focused on photonic quantum computers and quantum software. The company’s core bet is that photons can provide a more scalable path toward fault-tolerant quantum computing than several matter-based approaches.
Xanadu also owns PennyLane, a widely used open-source quantum programming framework that gives the company strategic visibility across the quantum developer ecosystem. The investment case is built around Xanadu’s full-stack positioning: hardware, software, compilers, and application development.
The company has already demonstrated important technical milestones, including Borealis, a 216-qubit photonic system, and Aurora, a modular photonic quantum computer designed to connect multiple photonic racks through optical fiber.
Management’s long-term roadmap targets large-scale fault-tolerant systems, with an architecture designed to scale toward 100,000 physical qubits and up to 500 logical qubits around 2029 to 2030.
Keysight Technologies (KEYS:NYSE)
Keysight Technologies is a leading electronic design, test, and measurement company with a strong position across communications, aerospace and defense, semiconductors, automotive, AI infrastructure, and advanced research markets.
The company’s products help engineers design, simulate, validate, and monitor increasingly complex electronic systems. This gives Keysight a durable “picks-and-shovels” role in several long-cycle technology markets where complexity, reliability, and precision matter more than unit volume alone.
In fiscal 2025, Keysight generated US$5.37 billion of revenue, US$1.24 billion of non-generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP) net income, and US$1.28 billion of free cash flow.
The quantum computing angle is increasingly important to the long-term story. Keysight is not trying to be a quantum processing unit (QPU) developer; instead, it supplies critical enabling infrastructure for quantum research and development (R&D), including quantum control systems, signal generation, measurement, device characterization, system-level simulation, and quantum electronics design automation (EDA) tools. Its Quantum Control System supports superconducting, spin, and other qubit technologies, while the company has also delivered what it describes as the world’s largest commercial quantum control system, supporting 1,000 plus qubits at the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology’s Global Research and Development Center for Business by Quantum-AI technology centre in Japan.
This positions Keysight as a neutral infrastructure beneficiary as quantum hardware platforms scale and as developers need better control, calibration, validation, and error-aware engineering tools.
Nvidia Corp. (NVDA:NASD)
Nvidia is the dominant accelerated-computing company and the central infrastructure supplier for the AI economy.
The company’s core business is built around graphics processing units (GPU), networking, systems, software libraries, and full-stack data-center platforms that allow customers to train, deploy, and scale AI workloads. In fiscal 2026, Nvidia reported revenue of US$215.9 billion, up 65 per cent year over year, with data centre revenue reaching US$197.3 billion and quarterly data centre revenue of US$62.3 billion in the January quarter. The quantum-computing angle strengthens Nvidia’s long-term positioning. While Nvidia is not a pure-play quantum hardware company, it is building one of the most important enabling layers for hybrid quantum-classical computing. CUDA-Q is Nvidia’s open-source quantum development platform, designed to let developers orchestrate CPU, GPU, and QPU resources inside one programming model.
Nvidia also positions CUDA-Q as qubit-agnostic, meaning it can work across different quantum hardware modalities while using GPU acceleration for simulation when real quantum hardware is not yet sufficient. This gives Nvidia a powerful “picks-and-shovels” role in quantum computing.
| DISCLOSURE | PERSONAL | FAMILY | PORTFOLIO/FUND |
|---|---|---|---|
| XNDU NASDAQ | Y | Y | Y |
| KEYS NYSE | Y | Y | Y |
| NVDA NASDAQ | Y | Y | Y |
PAST PICKS: MAY 21, 2025
Quantum Computing Inc. (QUBT: NASD)
Then: US$10.54
Now: US$9.56
Return: -9%
Total Return: -9%
D-Wave Quantum (QBTS:NYSE)
Then: US$15.36
Now: US$21.54
Return: 40%
Total Return: 40%
IonQ Inc. (IONQ:NYSE)
Then: US$33.54
Now: US$49.00
Return: 43%
Total Return: 43%
Total Return Average: 24%
| DISCLOSURE | PERSONAL | FAMILY | PORTFOLIO/FUND |
|---|---|---|---|
| QUBT NASDAQ | Y | Y | Y |
| QBTS NYSE | Y | Y | Y |
| IONQ NYSE | Y | Y | Y |
