Quantum methods in finance are a small, speculative literature: formulating portfolio selection as QUBO for annealers, QAOA and variational circuits for combinatorial allocation, amplitude estimation as a quadratic speed-up over Monte Carlo pricing, and quantum-kernel or variational classifiers for return prediction. Nearly all of it runs on simulators or on hardware too small to beat a laptop.

What to check when reading. The useful question is whether the paper compares against the best classical method at the same problem size, and whether the quantum component does anything the classical ablation cannot. Many results are “quantum-inspired” (tensor networks, simulated annealing) and perform as well on classical hardware; that is fine, but the paper should say so. Treat hardware-run results with the error-mitigation and shot-count details as the primary evidence.