Researchers from Rigetti Computing and the Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBA) announce they have taken an important step towards the use of quantum computing in the financial services sector.
This week, they published details of their experiments using a quantum computer to optimise a portfolio rebalancing strategy. QxBranch’s team, which was acquired by Rigetti in July this year, has been collaborating with CBA for a number of years and had developed a quantum computing simulator for the bank that could run on cloud or on-premises infrastructure.
They implemented and evaluated a portfolio rebalancing use case on an idealized simulator of a gate-model quantum computer. The characteristics of this exemplar application included trading in discrete lots, non-linear trading costs, and the investment constraint. Experimental analysis demonstrated the potential tractability of this application on Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum (NISQ) hardware, identifying portfolios within 5% of the optimal adjusted returns and with the optimal risk for a small eight-stock portfolio. (Computerworld)