And we pay guys to make “strategic decisions” like this?  God help us. Hewlett-Packard (NYSE:HPQ) stiffed its shareholders last Thursday with one of the dumbest announcements ever seen from a public company.

For starters, CEO Leo Apotheker has decided to scrap HPQ’s tablet computer only 48 days after the device went on sale. What an unbelievable, amateurish move. The world’s largest PC maker can’t produce a good enough tablet to capture at least a decent fraction of the market?

We all know Apple‘s (NASDAQ:AAPL) iPad is by far the top seller in the space right now. But does that mean there’s no room for anyone else?

Worse, Apotheker announced a deal to take over a British company, Autonomy Corp., for $10.25 billion in cash, which works out to 16 times forward sales and 64 times earnings. Yikes! Talk about rolling the dice.

Obviously, I’m very disappointed with Apotheker, and with HP’s board for allowing him to do these crazy things. It’s the curse of the public investor: If this package were put to a shareholder vote, it would surely go down in flames. But all the public shareholder can do for a protest is to sell the stock — and hordes of them did just that last Friday.

I, too, might sell at some point. Not now, though. Hundreds of stocks got smashed in the October 2008 market collapse, only to recover a large part (in some cases, all) of their losses over the next 30 months.

I believe HPQ will follow a similar trajectory. It might not get back to $40 in the next year, but I think it will be worth more than today’s hideous price below $25.

Hold, but don’t buy more.