Apple: The Biggest Stock Market Tragedy of 2012

If you decided to buy as AAPL was surging, you absolutely should not be down 26% today. No way. Flat maybe. Biding your time in the high $600s would be acceptable, but faced with the reality of dropping below $500 a share, that's tragic.

The following three stories take you through what a joke the last part of the year has been:

"Apple Selloff About A Year Too Soon"

"Investor Alert: Wall Street Analysts Screwing You on Apple"

"Apple Analysts Should Be Ashamed of Themselves This Morning"

What started as little more than capital gains tax-related selling snowballed, thanks to a financial media searching for answers and looking to the wrong people -- Wall Street analysts -- for them.

A few of these guys took the long-term cautious/bearish AAPL case I had been writing about since Steve Jobs died and bastardized it. They applied it to the here and now -- a period without credible challenges to Apple's dominance -- instead of telling it like it is:

• Apple is selling iPad minis like hot cakes.
• Apple, according to Kantar Worldpanel Com Tech, owns 53.3% of the domestic smartphone market over the most recent 12 weeks. That tells somebody who reads at the third grade-level that the iPhone 5 rules over an Android operating system spread across hardware makers.
• Even Apple's missteps turn positive. As Technology Tell reports, since the Google (GOOG) Maps app launched for iOS 6, adoption of Apple's mobile operating system has increased 29%.

You absolutely should be concerned that the culture at Apple has eroded and will continue to do so post-Steve Jobs. That some of the cracks we've seen this year mean something. But, again, it's too soon to do anything about it, particularly sell or not buy AAPL stock. That's all perfect-world stuff though.

Sadly, we live in a world where Wall Street analysts dominate the conversation. They took reasonable, tax-associated profit-taking and turned it into 2012's most irrational stock market tragedy.

Down with these guys.

Follow @rocco_thestreet

-- Written by Rocco Pendola in Santa Monica, Calif.

Rocco Pendola is TheStreet's Director of Social Media. Pendola's daily contributions to TheStreet frequently appear on CNBC and at various top online properties, such as Forbes.

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