MilestoneQuantum advantageDisputed
HSBC and IBM report a quantum-aided gain in bond trading predictions
Sep 25, 2025
HSBC said a trial with IBM's Heron quantum processors improved predictions of whether its bond price quotes would win customer trades by up to 34% over its standard methods, using real trading data from the European corporate bond market. The paper behind it says hardware noise seems to contribute to the gain.
Why it matters
Banks are testing whether today's noisy machines help with real business problems; critics say claims like this mistake hardware noise for a genuine quantum advantage.
Computer scientist Scott Aaronson and others argue the gain likely reflects hardware noise or the choice of comparison methods rather than any quantum speedup; the authors themselves say noise appears to contribute to the effect.
Sources (3)
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HSBC
HSBC demonstrates world’s first-known quantum-enabled algorithmic trading with IBM
“Experiment delivered up to 34% improvement in predicting the probability of winning customer inquiries in the European corporate bond market”
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arXiv (Ciceri et al., HSBC and IBM)
Enhanced fill probability estimates in institutional algorithmic bond trading using statistical learning algorithms with quantum computers
“We observe a relative gain of up to ~ 34% in out-of-sample test scores for those models with access to quantum hardware-transformed data over those using the original trading data or transforms by noiseless quantum simulation. These empirical results suggest that the inherent noise in current quantum hardware contributes to this effect and motivates further studies.”
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Shtetl-Optimized (Scott Aaronson)
HSBC unleashes yet another “qombie”: a zombie claim of quantum advantage that isn’t
“This strikes me as all but an admission that the “advantage” is just a strange artifact of the particular methods that they decided to compare—that it has nothing really to do with quantum mechanics in general, or with quantum computational speedup in particular.”
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