Everyone knows that Wall Street is a harsh mistress-- and with the recent surge in online trading (which opened up the world of trading stocks to anyone with an Internet connection, a few hundred bucks, and a functioning mouse hand) she's an ever-increasingly irrational mistress as well. Exhibit A: take what happened to AAPL's price after last month's earnings warning; the prediction of a $50 million shortfall and the ensuing panicked sell-off by twitchy dotcom gold-diggers caused Apple's market cap to bleed $8 billion overnight. Overreact much?

Despite the warning, when Apple wound up posting a profit that fell exactly within the range that the company had formerly predicted, Wall Street shaved a few more dollars off of Apple's stock price just for consistency's sake. So now Apple's reeling from the stock price equivalent of a massive bleeding head wound. Who's to blame? The press? If we had to judge solely by the lip-licking glee of CNET, who apparently feels that "Apple stock drops again" is real news, we might say yes. But the flip side is adequately represented, for example, in Morningstar.com's analysis that at its current price, buying AAPL is a "no-brainer." So it's not the press.

Apple itself? Granted, there were a few managerial missteps that contributed to the company's current woes, but overpricing the Cube by a few hundred bucks hardly justifies such a stock price butt-whipping. That's like getting the electric chair for squeezing the toothpaste tube in the middle. Nope, we lay the majority of the blame for AAPL's decline squarely on the shoulders of Wall Street itself-- and specifically the subset of Ritalin-munching, dotcom-milking, IPO-stalking, day-trading, "there's gold in them thar stocks" head cases who are just looking for the easy score and the quick million. Face it: if Ralph Kramden were alive today (and, um, a real person), he'd be recklessly e-trading with the rest of the cattle until Alice clocked him one with a frying pan. So here at AtAT, we've enacted a cunning plan to fight this scourge that's only adding to Apple's troubles. We've enlisted.

That's right, kiddies; one Ameritrade application later, and we're the latest mooks to climb on the e-trading bandwagon. But we're going to be different; we plan to subvert the brain-damaged status quo from within. We bought our shares of AAPL and we're going to treat them as what they are: a microscopic part of Apple itself. Our shares are a vote of confidence in a company we believe in, not some foreign currency to be cashed in at the first sign of trouble. Of course, that's not to say that we aren't eagerly anticipating Apple's rebound and a stupendous return on our investment. So in the interest of full disclosure, we'd like to inform you all that from now on, our deliriously non-objective pro-Apple content cranked out for love of the company and its products will be replaced by all-new deliriously non-objective pro-Apple content intended to make us some serious dough. Are we clear?