Don't be a raccoon investor. Raccoons can't resist anything that sparkles. They spot a glint in the mud and shuffle toward it as if they've stumbled on buried treasure. These days, the glittering thing pulling raccoon investors in is quantum computing. Quantum grabbed attention this week after President Trump put his name to two fresh executive orders. The first tells federal agencies to help bring a genuinely useful quantum computer to life by 2028. The second urges the government to shield its systems against the quantum-powered attacks that may come. That follows the $2 billion in funding grants the White House handed to nine American quantum computing firms back in May. All of this is perfectly good news and will move the science along. But it isn't a green light to start buying quantum computing shares. Quantum, at this stage, is overhyped. The first truly great quantum computing company likely doesn't even exist yet. The reason I'm raising this today is that I keep seeing investors pulled away from the real prize. During ordinary stretches, that kind of drift might set them back a few thousand dollars. But this is no time to let artificial intelligence (AI) slip out of focus. Depending on how big your portfolio is, the stakes run into the millions. The right small AI names are printing cash. Windows like this are rare. Make no mistake. I'm a believer in quantum computing. It's genuine science. Down the road, it could help us engineer better medicines… uncover new materials… fine-tune tangled systems… and crack problems that stump even the mightiest supercomputers we have today. But "one day" is the key phrase. A genuinely useful quantum computer remains years out. A decade or more, in all likelihood. Where your laptop reasons in bits, quantum machines work in qubits.