For better or for worse, it looks like the heyday of online stock trading has been over for quite some time. Whereas recklessly e-trading with money from the kids' college fund was once a bigger fad than the hula hoop ever was, evidently consumer America's love affair with the stock market evaporated as soon as everyone made the startling discovery that stock prices can actually go down, too. Go figure. Combine a skittish trading community with an economy running on fumes, and you've got a stock market only a mother could love... unless she's a mother who bought AAPL at $60, that is.

Yes, while Apple's stock hasn't been hammered nearly as badly as many tech stocks (don't ask us what we paid for our first batch of PALM-- another crying jag might send us over the edge), its current hovering-around-$19 price tag is significantly down from its year-high of $64. That's perhaps not so good if you already own a bunch of shares, but for investors who haven't lost everything they own on Red Hat stock and might be bottom-feeding for some artificially-low bargains, AAPL might actually be an attractive pick right about now. At least, that's what a handful of Wall Street analysts have concluded.

Faithful viewer Robert Fernando tipped us off to a Sacramento Bee article in which analyst Tim Bajarin is quoted as saying that since Steve Jobs wants his company to become the "major consumer digital company of the future," Apple "may be the only traditional PC company to survive and move into the digital world." Of course, we've heard that sort of thing from Bajarin already, so his continued opinion that AAPL's a good risk might not carry as much weight as it otherwise could. But hold up-- the article notes another analyst, A.G. Edwards's Brett Miller, who calls Apple his "best pick in the PC sector" due to "increasing gross margins, declining operating expenses, one of the best inventory managements in the business and a rock-solid balance sheet." Woo-hoo! Could this be the boost that AAPL needs to start climbing to more appropriate levels?

Well, since the article came out yesterday and AAPL is currently down another half a buck, evidently not-- more's the pity. Still, Apple customers know a thing or too about sticking it out for the long haul; if you think Apple's got a solid chance of outshining the pack when (if?) this economy finally turns around, you might want to keep AAPL on your "potential bargain-basement stocks" list. We'd buy more ourselves, but pretty soon we're probably going to be investing heavily in more Apple hardware instead of more Apple stock. Mmmmm, Quicksilver...