The Five Dumbest Things on Wall Street This Week

1. Apple's Pie-Eyed Pumpers

Thanks to the intrepid research team at Piper Jaffray, there's now a scientific explanation why consumers claim they're helpless to resist the allure of Apple's (AAPL Quote) iPods, iPhones, iMacs or Steve Jobs' signature eyeblack mock turtlenecks.

Piper's mall-based research over the Thanksgiving holiday weekend indicates that Apple stores exert a "gravitational pull" on shoppers, or so declared Piper senior research analysts Gene Munster and Michael Olson. For fans of the statistical analysis, this magnetic force can be quantified.

"There is a 27% chance that a shopper walking within 25 feet of an Apple store entrance would actually enter the store," according to Munster and Olson's calculations. ...