Still, I wonder why other assets' valuation is (by comparison) higher than AM's, in exchange for (from an outsider's viewpoint) a considerably less ambitious operation. Friedcat and company have outperformed themselves several times, whereas the rest of the assets' seem to be stagnant, and generate smaller (and dwindling) dividends.
One reason is that smaller companies still have room to grow. If you control 1% of the network hash rate, increasing to 5% with addition of new hardware is feasible. If you're AM, you can't really double your mining proceeds because you'd be above (or very close to) the 51% limit. Thus, what you see in some mining assets is the expectation of profitability increase whereas at this point, the dividends from AM can really only go down.
That's why hardware sales is so key to evaluating AM right now; if someone comes out with next-gen chips for mass market before AM and grabs a huge chunk of the hardware market then AM will fall back to a dividend must lower than today. Add the halving effect (which is around 0.03 per month at a price of 2.5BTC) and you're seeing yields possibly down to 10-15%, which is not entirely what most people bought even if it is a good deal.
Of course, if AM's total network percentage over time is anywhere near what friedcat predicted (10%) then dividends will be negative in real value, which would be a complete disaster. In other words, AM must exceed it's own expectations by 150% to return the same yield (20-25%) as some other mining assets.
Oh, and just to beat the haters and naysayers to the punch, I still have great confidence in AM in the long run, I just don't think everyone realizes how long a run that must be :-)
.b