Just spotted something worth paying attention to in the market right now. With the S&P 500 up nearly 94% since late 2022 and major banks like Deutsche Bank projecting it could hit 8,000 by year-end, there's some real momentum happening. If you've got around $1,000 to deploy and you're looking for promising stocks that could ride this wave, I'd narrow it down to three plays that seem particularly interesting.

First, there's the quantum computing angle. IonQ is still relatively under the radar, but the numbers are hard to ignore. Their revenue basically doubled in the first nine months of last year, hitting $68 million, with Q3 alone jumping 222%. What caught my attention is they just hit 99.99% accuracy on their two-qubit gate performance — that's basically error-free territory. McKinsey is projecting the quantum computing market could explode from $4 billion in 2024 to $72 billion by 2035. Yeah, the stock trades at a premium valuation and it's volatile, but if you're looking for a promising stocks pick with real long-term potential, this is the kind of bet that could pay off big if quantum actually takes off.

Then there's the AI infrastructure play, which honestly feels like the safer move right now. Gartner is forecasting AI infrastructure spending will jump 41% this year to $1.4 trillion. Celestica is basically the backbone of this — they're designing and manufacturing the networking components that go into AI accelerator chips for Broadcom, Marvell, AMD, and Intel. Their revenue jumped 27% to $12.2 billion, and the growth is actually accelerating. Trading at just 3.2 times sales, this one looks like a genuine value opportunity.

Micron is the other AI infrastructure play I'd watch. They're clocking stunning growth — earnings could jump nearly 4x this year with sales up 100%. The reason this is sustainable is simple: there's a serious shortage of memory chips, especially the high-bandwidth stuff data centers need. Prices have spiked because demand is way outpacing supply, and that trend should hold through 2028. Even though Micron's up 243% over the past year, it's still trading under 10 times sales. That's the kind of valuation that makes promising stocks in this space actually feel achievable.

The way I see it, if you're looking to put cash to work and you've got some risk tolerance, these three represent pretty different angles on where the market's heading. Quantum is the moonshot, but the AI infrastructure plays feel more grounded. Either way, there's real tailwinds behind all of them.