Please stay tuned for important disclosure information at the conclusion of this episode.

Welcome to Investing Insights. I'm Sarah Hansen, filling in for Ivana Hampton today.

Quantum computing stocks have surged in popularity over the past year, capturing investors' enthusiasm

on the coattails of the artificial intelligence boom. Quantum computing technology promises

to be one of the most transformative developments of the next few decades, but are investors

getting out over their skis? Morningstar's analysts view quantum technology as promising, but caution that it's not quite

ready for the mainstream.

Here to walk us through the landscape and the best way for investors to get some early exposure

in their portfolios is Dan Romanov, a senior equity research analysts on the technology

team at Morningstar.

So, Dan, thank you so much for being here.

Yeah, happy to be here.

Great. So we are talking about quantum computing today, which has really, really captured

people's attention. It's also, I think, maybe pretty opaque for a lot of people,

including me. So could you walk us through, you know, what is quantum

computing? Why is it unique? Why are investors talking about it? Why is it promising?

Sure. And it's pretty opaque for me, too. I got to tell you that physics here are very complicated.

So it was a learning experience for sure. And so I would say in a nutshell what it is,

it's a totally different way to do the compute function. So we're used to this binary world,

one and zero, you know, voltage flowing through a transistor, one, zero bits. That's sort of the binary

world that exists. In quantum computing, we're doing something

similar. We take a particle of some kind, say an atom, and we kind of observe it. What is the state

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