lvgaldieriAn Incomplete Look at Cantor Fitzgerald’s Rigetti Trades and Some Reconsideration of the Commerce-Cantor Connection
Right around the time Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick was taking a 10 percent equity stake in Intel for the US government, Cantor Fitzgerald —the firm Lutnick ran for 34 years, and which is now run by his sons — was building an enormous position in the chipmaker. That much is clear from the SEC filings I discussed in a previous post on Trump’s Intel trades.
From the quarterly reports filed with the SEC, it’s impossible to say whether Cantor built its position before the government announced the Intel deal, or in response to it. That remains an open question and a key one. It would also be helpful to know whether this was an isolated incident, a mere coincidence, or part of a pattern. Are there other Cantor trades of public companies in which the government has taken a stake that work like Intel? Are there other trades that point to a Cantor-Commerce connection?
In this post I want to give a little more shape to this question by looking briefly at Cantor’s trades of another technology company in the government’s growing equity portfolio: Rigetti Computing.
Rigetti is one of nine deals, all with quantum computing companies, that the Department of Commerce announced in May. (Tad De Haven has put together a useful list.) A government award of up to $100 million requires that over the next three years Rigetti meet certain milestones on its roadmap toward “quantum advantage.” The terms of the award allow the Department of Commerce to take an equity stake in Rigetti “consistent with the total amount of the funding,” and with shares priced at a 15 percent discount from closing price on the date of the award. (On 20 May 2026, the day before the award was announced, RGTI closed just below $17 per share.).
That’s the deal in a nutshell. Now let’s turn to the SEC filings that detail Cantor’s trade.
At first glance, the position that Cantor Fitzgerald LP took in Rigetti Computing looks something like the protective collar position the firm took in Intel. After an options-heavy, hedged entry in Q3 2025 – 2.1 million long shares protected by 2.4 million at-the-money puts – Cantor adopts a position in Q4 that looks something like a long straddle, with calls and puts basically balanced. That would allow the firm to respond to some big market moving event they anticipated; or it could just reflect the balance of inventory Cantor needed to facilitate client bets, as Q3’s quantum hype devolved into Q4’s uncertainty.
As Rigetti’s share price steadily decayed in Q1 2026, down as low as $12.90 just before the quarter’s end, Cantor drastically cut its Rigetti position by about 80 percent, from a notional $112 to $24 million. So it looks as if the firm was a) revising its thesis and winding down its Rigetti book well before the late May 2026 announcement of the $100 million award or, more likely, b) all along Cantor had been running a broker-dealer facilitated trade, and cut inventory as the initial quantum hype wore off and investors exited RGTI.
In other words, Cantor did not hang around for the Commerce announcement party (which wasn’t a complete blowout and didn’t last all that long, but it was a party all the same: shares of RGTI rose 30 percent on the 21 May news).
The picture is incomplete. SEC filings for Q2 2026, due in mid-August, will tell us more. Did Cantor reverse course and rebuild its position in Q2 2026 in anticipation of the Commerce announcement? That would be a telling move, and it’s certainly possible, but that doesn’t look like the path they were taking. The filings we already have suggest that the firm (sensibly) decreased its exposure – derisked – as the share price fell and the horizon stayed cloudy, or reduced inventory as it managed client demand.
The timing and scale of Cantor’s RGTI entry might still give pause. The firm went from zero holdings in the first half of 2025 to a massive position in Q3. That’s the sort of aggressive, confident move that Cantor made when it increased its Intel holdings 50X in a single quarter, as Lutnick and Commerce attorney Dave Shapiro strong-armed the company. What’s more, Cantor built its hoard and hedge position in Rigetti before the end of Q3 2025, and at least three weeks before the Wall Street Journal reported, on 23 October 2025, that Commerce was talking with Rigetti and other quantum computing companies about taking an equity stake in return for a government award, as they had done with Intel in August.
That may raise eyebrows. But the timing of Cantor’s entry alone doesn’t indicate that they had knowledge of the Commerce-Rigetti talks or establish a Cantor-Commerce connection. Investors were piling into Rigetti and other quantum computing companies at the time. On September 18th, the Air Force Research Laboratory awarded Rigetti a contract; on September 19, 2025, there was news that the administration was considering an overhaul of the national quantum computing strategy: “speculation that the Trump administration could soon unveil new U.S. quantum technology initiatives also could be fueling the rally.” Online hype (like this video and this one, both cued to the mark) described a “combination of speculative and institutional buying” that was most likely driven by a mix of sound observation and FOMO.
Cantor Fitzgerald LP could have just been acting on public information, or not even making a directional bet on Rigetti at all, just countering moves by clients, subsidiaries, and other entities.
In the absence of any other evidence and without the 13F filing for Q2 2026, it is reasonable to conclude that that’s probably what went down. My best guess is that Cantor’s Rigetti position reflects the evolving bid-ask spread. Cantor didn’t even need a Rigetti thesis, they just needed to answer investors who wanted in on or wanted out of quantum computing. (And maybe the same could be said about the firm’s Intel position; we just don’t know.)
None of this is dispositive, of course, but it argues against a Cantor-Commerce connection or back channel in this particular instance. It does not assuage legitimate concerns about how the Intel deal went down, from the mob-style, arm-twisting extortion of the company to the Intel trades reported on Trump’s 278-T disclosure, which Liz Oyer reads as “a roadmap to the ways he is personally profiting from the powers of the presidency.” It does introduce more uncertainty into my reading of the public record and it makes me wary of drawing hasty conclusions about these trades from highly-sanitized SEC filings.
De Haven thinks corruption is inevitable when the government takes equity stakes in public companies. He may be right about that; I just don’t see proof of it in these filings. There are, however, still plenty of other places to look for evidence of corruption involving Lutnick and sons, from Kazakhstan to Oklahoma. One can only hope that Senator Van Hollen and others with investigative powers and resources will continue to look into the many ways “official Commerce Department business has intersected with Cantor Fitzgerald’s financial interests during [Lutnick’s] tenure.”
I plan to revisit the Rigetti trades in mid August, after Cantor files its Q2 13F. In the meantime, if there are things I’ve missed or places where I’ve gone astray, let me know.
#INTC #corruption #ethics #extortion #governmentEthics #hoarding #hype #kleptocracy #oligarchy #politicalInsiderTrading #power #quantumComputing
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