One of my friends – I’ll call him Pete – made a big investing mistake years ago. The kind of mistake I hope you’ll always avoid.

Pete passed on one of the greatest tech opportunities of all time. He thought the negative sentiment surrounding the company would stop it from making investors money.

But man, is he regretting it right now.

You would feel the same way, too, if you turned your back on the chance to earn a whopping return of 34,238.5%.

That kind of gain could turn $10,000 into $3,433,850.

Just let that sink in for a moment.

This is why I’m writing to you today – to make sure you don’t pass up on these amazing tech opportunities and later regret it. To make sure you get the chance to profit as much as possible.

This is also why I keep saying it only takes a handful of tech winners – and in some cases, just one – to make you a millionaire, if you know where to look.

With that in mind, I’m going to talk about a stock that’s set to double again in less than five years. And the first step to taking advantage of this opportunity is ignoring mainstream media – and not falling for what they’re saying like my friend Pete did…

All The Negative Noise Will Keep You from Profits

If you’ve followed along with me for even a short time, you know that at heart I am a rules-based investor. That’s why I developed a five-part system to screen for tech breakouts.

And the stock we’ve been talking about is a classic case of why you need to heed Rule No. 2, which says to “separate the signal from the noise.”

Indeed, you’d have a tough time finding a stock that generates more noise from Wall Street and Big Media than Apple Inc. (NASDAQ: AAPL).

Back in the late 1990s, the so-called “in group” was predicting the firm’s imminent collapse. That includes my friend Pete.

At the time, he was working as a Wall Street analyst. His boss sent him to Cupertino to visit the Silicon Valley legend’s headquarters.

My friend Pete left that visit unimpressed. He could not see how the company would overcome all the negative sentiment facing it at the time. So he didn’t recommend the stock.

I don’t remember the exact date of his visit, but as I recall, it was in the summer of 1997. Back then, the stock was in the cellar, trading for a split-adjusted price of less than $1 – and often even half that figure.

Wall Street couldn’t possibly see a bright future for the firm following the disastrous reign of former CEO John Scully.

But all that changed on Sept. 15, 1997. That’s the day the late Steve Jobs came back to run Apple.

An Amazing Comeback… and the Rest Is History

Here’s the thing. The day Apple announced Steve Jobs’ return, the stock closed at just $0.78 a share.

Compare that to its recent closing high of $317.57.

Folks who wrote off Jobs’ return as nothing more than the result of a corporate power struggle missed the big picture. Jobs was a visionary leader when he co-founded Apple in 1976, and he never lost his knack for breakout products.

As we now know the best was yet to come.

Just four years after Jobs came back, Apple turned the music industry upside down by introducing the iPod portable music player.

In doing so, he wrote the playbook for Apple’s success. The iPod was not the first MP3 digital music player, but it certainly was the best.

Ditto the MacBook. It launched in 2006 and was a late entry in the laptop wars. But it was so advanced that it eventually outsold all other laptops.

And just a year later, Apple ushered in the mobile revolution with the now iconic iPhone.

Of course, there’s even more irony about Apple today. When Jobs died on Oct. 5, 2011, Wall Street and Big Media said Apple’s glory days were over.

A lot of folks made the same mistake my friend Pete did a decade earlier. They once again wrote off Apple as a bad investment.

This time, the rap on Apple was that CEO Tim Cook was no Steve Jobs. So, without that mind for innovation on its side, the stock would hit the brakes.

Instead, it went from closing at a split-adjusted $54.04 the day Jobs died to more than $310, where it trades today.

That’s a 395.6% return, not counting dividends.

I still see plenty of upside ahead. I believe Apple is set to double from here in less than five years.

I’ll be sure to check back in to show you why there’s still plenty of money to be made on Apple.

— Michael A. Robinson

Source: Money Morning