The Canadian Investment Regulatory Organization (CIRO) ordered a trading halt to Xanadu ($XNDU) stock late Wednesday morning after the recently public company saw its share price briefly spike more than 60 percent.
CIRO said in a statement that the temporary halt was issued due to a “single stock circuit breaker,” which occurs when an individual stock price moves more than 10 percent within a five-minute period during a set time during the trading day. The halt is intended to mitigate volatility and foster investor confidence in a fair market. Trading quickly resumed a few minutes later.
Xanadu saw its share price briefly spike more than 60 percent on the TSX late Wednesday morning.
The Toronto-based quantum computing company made its public markets debut just last month. It ended its first day on the Toronto Stock Exchange at around $16, but has sat around the $10 mark until a run-up over the last few days, which left it sitting at around $30 on Tuesday morning. The stock experienced a similar price spike on the Nasdaq, too.
The halt came alongside a broader rally in quantum stocks, including D-Wave ($QBTS) and Rigetti ($RGTI), which respectively saw single-day price growth of more than 20 percent and 13 percent; both companies have Canadian roots, with D-Wave having been founded in BC by a team of UBC researchers, and Rigetti being founded by Moose Jaw, Sask.-born entrepreneur Chad Rigetti.
The rush may have been kicked off by Nvidia, which announced on Monday that it had released a family of open-source quantum AI models, designed to help researchers and companies build useful quantum processors. The chipmaker said it would also release a “cookbook” of quantum computing workflows and training data for developers to use.
BetaKit has reached out to CIRO for comment. Xanadu declined to comment on the rally and trading halt.
Xanadu is both the first Canadian technology company to debut on the TSX since 2021, and the first pure-play photonic quantum computing business to go public.
The global quantum computing market is expected to grow from $1.7 billion USD to more than 11 billion USD over the next four years.
With files from Madison McLauchlan and Josh Scott.
Feature Image courtesy Xanadu.