There were four calls in the past week. My brother. My brother-in-law. A friend in Arizona. My pal Bre-Xer. They all had the same question. Is it time, they asked breathlessly, to buy Nortel?

Alas, they have been stricken with the worst sickness of the stock market. They have contracted Nortelitis, which is even more dangerous than that other malady known as tickeritis (tickeritis: One who is hopelessly addicted to stock quotes).

If your heart is thumping, your trading finger is twitching and you've been calling up Nortel quotes more than 300 times per day, you too have the disease.

Ah, Nortel Networks. NT. The ticker from hell. It is the TSX version of the Titanic. It wiped out your granny's nest egg.

It put egg on the face of your broker who told you it was a bargain at $100 (after dipping from its peak of $124 five years ago). It made fools of the analysts. The Brampton telecommunications company's credibility is in shreds.

Yet, it's still THE stock to watch in Canada. It's like your old flame. You know she's trouble. Yet, you can't take your eyes off her. You've been burned and you won't rest easy with a grocery stock until you get even. As we man the Nortel hotline, Nortel is busting out over $3 to $3.35, which may or may not be another head fake. On Friday the 13th, it trades 11,814,021 shares in a sleepy market. Nothing comes close in volume (Noranda is second with less than seven million shares). Nortelitis is alive and well.

I tell my brother to get a grip and forget Nortel. I tell my brother-in-law to lose his trading password already. My friend in Arizona wants to know if he can trust the numbers after Nortel's numerous delays in financial reporting. He tells me he heard they fixed their adding machine. I can't confirm the rumour. I tell my pal Bre-Xer to get Ross Healy on the phone. I figure he should be able to talk some sense into my pal. (Healy is the money manager who has done his darnedest to help those stricken by Nortelitis).

What you need to know about Nortel is that it is not the kind of stock that Warren Buffett drools over. It doesn't quite fit Buffett's criteria at Berkshire Hathaway, home of the $83,000 US stock (NYSE:BRK.A). No, it isn't exactly General Electric. Hey, even Kirk Kerkorian, the youthful 87-year-old multibillionaire who recently made a pitch to boost his holdings in troubled General Motors (TSX:GM), might not be contemplating taking a run at Nortel.

Yet, if you're a trader as opposed to a long-term investor, it's hard not to keep ol' blood and guts Nortel on your watchlist, particularly in a stock market where just about everything else has been in a downtrend or trading sideways on weak volume.

Nortel's stock price has been cut in half since last June's high of $6.88, which goes some distance in explaining this latest outbreak of Nortelitis. But of course, this is nothing new for Canada's most volatile large-cap stock. As many Nortel investors found out when the stock imploded from $124 to $50 in 2000, a beaten-up stock isn't necessarily a cheap stock.

If you believe in technical analysis, Nortel shares have been gaining some momentum lately although it hasn't established a clear uptrend and also faces an uphill battle with tech stocks out of favour. Despite recent strength, the stock is still in a bearish mood with a "descending continuation triangle" with a possible target in the $2.50-$2.70 range, according to Recognia Technical Analysis (www.recognia.com).

Yet technical analysis doesn't always work, particularly with a powderkeg of a stock such as Nortel that has frequently blown up overzealous punters just when it appeared to be gaining a head of steam.

My pal Bre-Xer points to the critical pom-pom factor that seems to favour Nortel at the moment (stocks that Wall Street loves are often the ones you should hate).

True enough. The one-time Wall Street tech darling has only five cheerleaders among the 23 analysts who cover the stock. Besides five buy recommendations, 17 other analysts rate the stock a hold (which in the analyst world is often a polite way of saying sell) and one analyst has a sell recommendation on it.

Just remember, gang - Nortel should not be viewed as anything but a sleep-at-night stock. It's a trade. An adrenalin rush for day-trading junkies. If you must take the flirtatious old gal for a nostalgic twirl on the dance floor, don't fall in love.

As many have painfully learned since Nortel began its fall from grace five years ago, owning shares of Nortel is like sleeping with an elephant. If it rolls over, you're Dumbo.

* FOUR YEARS AGO IN THE EDGE: Healy, the president of Strategic Analysis Corp., had this columnist literally eating a column that stated: "The day Nortel hits $18 we'll literally eat these words with perogies and sour cream.”

(Healy received hate mail in 2001 when he gave Nortel an $18 target while the stock was trading at $45).

With Nortel stock at $15 four years ago, Healy, who had cautioned investors about Nortel back in 2000 when Bay Street was still fawning over the company, blasted then-CEO John Roth.

"John Roth (who was retiring) is walking away with $133 million, but investors are walking away with holes in their shoes," piped Healy. "So I can't feel sorry for someone like that. I have no use for John Roth. I don't like what he did. It rankles me. He will be the business school case on how not to run a company. He was pursuing the impossible, the pie in the sky. The problem with the pie in the sky is that when it hits you in the face, you look stupid."

* SAGE WORDS: "Our life is frittered away by detail. Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity!" - 19th century philosopher Henry David Thoreau

HOT STOCK: Hartco Corp.
TSX:HCC $5.55 Up $1.35 (+32.1 per cent) on 128,000 shares (based on weekly results through May 19 for Canadian stocks over $1)
No surprise with this income trust conversion. Hartco had trust written all over it. Before its announcement that it was converting, Hartco fit the bill as a sleepy stock with escalating earnings, a low price/earnings ratio and a low profile. The Montreal-based electronic stores retailer with banners such as CompuSmart is also tightly held, with CEO Harry Hart holding about 64 per cent of its shares.

HOT STOCK: TIR Systems Ltd.
TSX:TIR $1.63
Down 87 cents (-34.8 per cent) on 561,300 shares (based on weekly results through May 19 for Canadian stocks over $1)
You Light Up My Life ... Well, not exactly. Shareholders of this Vancouver lighting systems outfit weren't exactly in the mood for singing the Debbie Boone tune after TIR cast a long shadow with bleak financials (a $2.9-million loss or 13 cents per share for the quarter ending March 31) and a dreary outlook.

(Gyle Konotopetz can be reached at gyle@businessedge.ca)