This 'Fallen Angel' Has Found Its GrooveBy Joel Litman, chief investment officer, Altimetry
 Folks called them traitors...
In 1957, eight men signed their names on a crisp stack of $1 bills in the Redwood Room of the Clift Hotel in San Francisco. Each kept a signed bill as a symbol of what they were about to do – commit career suicide. The men had PhDs and were advanced physicists. And they were about to walk away from one of the most powerful scientists in America. Their boss, William Shockley, had won a Nobel Prize the previous year for co-inventing the transistor. He'd moved from Bell Labs to a sleepy California orchard town to start a new company called Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory. At first, it seemed like the future had arrived. Shockley was forming a startup to commercialize his transistor breakthrough. The best minds in the field were flocking to join him in the fledgling technology industry...But Shockley was a tyrant. He went so far as to subject his employees to lie-detector tests. Two of his top engineers, Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore, eventually had enough. They gathered six of their colleagues and, together, wrote a letter to a New York investment firm, looking for an escape. Shockley was furious. He labeled Noyce, Moore, and their colleagues the "Traitorous Eight." But junior banker Arthur Rock wasn't intimidated. When the group's letter landed on his desk, Rock saw their potential. He flew to California and made them an offer. They would start their own company with his friend Sherman Fairchild – heir to the IBM fortune and a science enthusiast with money to burn. Their new company was called Fairchild Semiconductor. And it soon became the most important chipmaker in the world...
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 'On August 27, I'm Releasing the List' Hedge funds have paid Joel Litman $100,000 for a single stock market report. He has consulted for the Pentagon – and lectured at Harvard. But on Thursday, August 27 at 8 p.m. Eastern time, he's going live to release what could be the biggest announcement of his career: a short list of stocks that could soar 1,000% or more as Elon Musk launches a new venture in rural Texas. Click here to learn more. |
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Noyce invented the silicon integrated circuit. Moore established the scientific law that predicted how powerful microchips would be for the next 50 years. (The law still bears his name today.) Their nonhierarchical culture became the blueprint for every Silicon Valley startup that followed. But the company's success bred even more tension...While Fairchild was a much better place to work, the "Traitorous Eight" still didn't own the whole business. After about a decade, the engineers hadn't earned the riches they thought they deserved. So in 1968, Noyce and Moore became traitors once again. They walked out of Fairchild to start another new company... on their own terms. Intel (INTC) would build memory chips out of silicon instead of magnetic cores. Rock, ever the supportive backer, raised $2.5 million as seed funding. The business dominated the tech industry for decades. It was credited with inventing the first microprocessor. At its peak in the 1990s, Intel held more than 90% of the global market share for that technology. But in the past few years, the company has been struggling... A few recent generations of computer chips didn't live up to expectations. And at the same time, Intel has spent billions of dollars to open up an in-house chipmaking factory. Intel looked like a "fallen angel." Its stock had dropped more than 70% from its pandemic high to August 2025. That month, the U.S. government stepped in to stop the bleeding. It announced that it would acquire a 10% stake in Intel. It did so by converting a previous $8.9 billion award from the CHIPS and Science Act into an equity stake. This move is part of the Trump administration's goal to strengthen domestic chip production. And it seems to have chosen Intel as its industry foothold. The government wants to ensure that the company keeps making chips... That's why we recommended Intel in Hidden Alpha back in November 2025. Since that time, the stock has exploded... Our combined position is up 144% as of this writing. That said, Intel still has room to run. You see, leading chipmaker Nvidia (NVDA) purchased $5 billion worth of Intel stock – or about 4% of the company – in December 2025. That deal gives Intel a big opportunity to profit from the AI data-center market... by providing the chips that will power Nvidia's AI infrastructure. With the backing of the U.S. government, Nvidia is giving Intel a new lease on life. It now has another chance to become a serious player in the computing space. Regards, Joel Litman
August 20, 2026 P.S. Chip production is one of the major AI bottlenecks. And Elon Musk is going after it. In fact, he wants to take control of AI's entire future. Win or lose, Musk will make massive investments to pursue this plan. And as this capital flows through the market, certain stocks will soar. My team and I have identified a predictable market signal that shows when capital starts to move... before most people realize what's happening. It's called The Launch Signal. It applies to all kinds of stocks going back decades. And it's the single best way to identify big opportunities in the market. We're going live with a special briefing next Thursday that covers how we're using this signal to identify companies that are perfectly positioned to benefit from Musk's next move. Sign up now for next week's event, and you can get exclusive access to a tool we're using to help us pinpoint which companies are going to be winners. Click here to get all the details.
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