It’s small, uncomfortable and can be obscenely profitable

Back in late 2019, long before artificial intelligence became dinner-table conversation and well before quantum computing started showing up in mainstream market commentary, I was already obsessed with one simple question…

What technologies would define the next decade?

Not next quarter. Not next year. The next ten years.

At the time, I was also preparing to head to CES in Las Vegas in January 2020 to explore some of these big tech ideas and trends in detail.

Little did I know how fortuitous this all would be, because only weeks after I got back from Vegas, the entire world’s trajectory changed.

Fortunately, I’d been boots on the ground in the lead up to lockdowns, so I already had a tight grasp of the big ideas I already liked.

My time was spent digging into themes like bitcoin, crypto and digital assets, artificial intelligence, autonomous vehicles, the commercialisation of space, and a long-term moonshot around quantum computing.

My take was these were long-cycle technological shifts — the kind that take years to gestate before suddenly breaking into the mainstream.

Fast-forward to today and look around. AI is in a frenzy, self-driving cars are no longer science fiction but increasingly on our roads, space is being commercialised at scale and SpaceX is set to IPO later this year.

And quantum computing is no longer a research curiosity — it’s a battleground for global superpowers and trillion-dollar companies.

But back then, in 2019, these ideas still felt early, uncomfortable, easy to dismiss and plenty of my critics thought as much.

That was precisely the opportunity.

Quantum before it was fashionable

Quantum computing, in particular, stood out.

It was lightly covered and widely misunderstood. Most investors lumped it into the “too hard” basket and moved on. And as for major research providers, well there just simply wasn’t coverage, the companies weren’t big enough, and trading in them was so low on volume there wasn’t money to be made covering them.

That didn’t bother me one bit.

Instead, I began recommending pure-play quantum companies, long before the theme had any real momentum.

Names like IonQ, Rigetti Computing, and D-Wave Systems entered the conversation in 2020, 2021, and 2022.

These were real businesses, with real technology, operating at the cutting edge of physics and computation.

Crucially, they were tiny compared to the tech giants that were pressing on with classical computing and accelerating compute…the foundation for AI.

While Google and IBM were pouring billions into internal quantum labs, these tiny companies were pure-play exposure. If quantum computing worked, they stood to benefit disproportionately (in a good way).

But there was one company in the quantum realm that excited me more than all the rest.

Not because it was bigger. Not because it was better known. But because it was the exact opposite.

The stock no one was watching

In 2019, most investors would have told you Archer Materials was a mining stock.

In my original report for the stock I said,

“Archer is a quantum computing company that you’ve probably never heard of. And there’s good reason for that.”

A quick Google search would have reinforced that view. A cursory glance at the ASX description would have sent most people straight past it.

To the market, Archer looked like just another obscure materials company, one of hundreds cluttering the tiny end of the Aussie exchange.

That surface-level view was completely wrong.

Archer wasn’t really a mining company. It was a quantum technology company hiding in plain sight.

On 15 August 2018 Archer announced it had finalised terms “for exclusive rights to develop and commercialise intellectual property (IP) related to a carbon-based quantum computing technology

So yes, they had mining bits and bobs, but it was the quantum chip technology that was the real game changer.

With a market capitalisation of just AU$25 million at the time, it didn’t even qualify for most institutional watchlists and never hit the mainstream wires.

But when I dug into the technology, it stopped me in my tracks.

Archer was developing quantum-enabled devices based on advanced semiconductor materials, including qubit-scale architectures that could operate at room temperature.

It was a real quantum computing chip.

That last point mattered enormously. Archer’s approach promised scalability, practicality and cost advantages that were genuinely disruptive.

This wasn’t blue-sky hype. It was real intellectual property, real engineering and real progress.

And almost nobody was looking.

As the next year and a half rolled on, the broader quantum computing theme began to catch fire.

This came as the world went through one of the largest injections of liquidity it had ever seen off the back of the pandemic, and money became virtually free.

Suddenly the market was running white hot, and the big tech trends of the future were pumping in price.

And of course, the stocks most people knew about did well.

But the smallest of all, Archer Materials did something extraordinary.

As the market finally realised what Archer actually was — not a miner, not a speculative shell, but a genuine quantum technology play — the re-rating was violent.

By August 2021, Archer delivered a total return of 1,875% for investors who were positioned when I told them of the opportunity.

At that point I realised it was time to take profits. And we did.

It was the result of thematic investing done properly, identifying the long-term technological shift first, then finding the most asymmetric exposure within it.

Who said size doesn’t matter? It does.

We’re now living through the payoff phase of many ideas that were seeded over half a decade ago. AI, quantum, space, autonomous systems, digital assets… these trends are all overnight successes 10-years in the making.

And even now, in this market, many of the $1 billion-plus companies riding these themes today will continue to do very well. There’s no question about that.

But if there’s one lesson Archer reinforced for me, it’s this, the most explosive returns rarely come from the obvious names.

They come from the minnows, the uncomfortable stocks.

The companies that sit outside benchmarks and well off the lists of the world’s big research houses and institutional fundies.

That’s the corner of the market I’ll always be drawn to. Not because it’s easy, but because that’s where asymmetric opportunities lie.

And in a market overflowing with world-changing technology, I suspect there are more Archers out there right now than most investors realise.

Until next time,

Sam Volkering
Contributing Editor, Investor’s Daily

P.S. The bigger takeaway from this article isn’t just what opportunity is forming — it’s why most investors won’t see it in time. Structural blind spots, political shifts, and regulatory inertia are creating the same kind of mispricing James Altucher has learned to watch for over decades.

In this upcoming briefing, he connects those forces directly to where capital is already starting to move — and where it hasn’t moved yet. If you want to understand how moments like this quietly turn into defining market inflection points, you’ll want to secure your spot before it goes live.