Thats not correct. When it was at 4.5BTC the shareprice was so high that it had a 30% annual profit. Now the shareprice again is 30% of the annual return the divs are bringing. So no, the shares werent overpriced back then. Otherwise it would mean the shares are overpriced now too.
That's a shortsighted view: back then it was obvious that ASICMINER wouldn't be able to maintain its network share indefinitely without eating the profits to reinvest. The value of a share shouldn't be linked to the short-time dividend history but take their future evolution into account (after all past dividends have zero value for someone buying shares, only future ones do).
The question today is if ASICMINER will be able to raise its future dividends. The last ones were nearly 100% mining income and 0% hardware sales. As they are on the path to gen2, if there's no accident obviously in the future they will raise hardware sales and maybe mining income too.
This is why I think it made sense to sell at 4.5 and it makes sense to buy now. Basing sell/buy decisions just on the last dividends is a recipe for losing bitcoins in my opinion.
Right... shareprice should look different... but you can see its relatively strict connected to the divs. And i think its not a miracle why this is the case. Friedcat is relatively silent and this means doubts. Of course we can think it will jump to 2BTC soon... we only dont know.
And even if its relatively certain... selling now could still make sense because we dont have a clue if the price wont drop to 2.5btc soon. A loss never could be made in by divs in the short time. That means one could buy the double amount of shares then. (Except big shareholders of course.) But the small traders "make" the prices and the orderbook is way too thin.
When i look at the market... Asicminer is at 0.64BTC and ActiveMining at 0.0008BTC. They both work on 28nm process node if im not mistaken. Both have shown in the past that they can do IPO's though friedcat is the only one that has shown he can bring out ASIC's. Asicminer has 400,000 shares while ActiveMining has 10,000,000 shares. Thats 25 times more. So ActiveMinings Price compared would be 0.02BTC to get the same percent of the company like one asicminer share has. Both have relatively good chances to succeed but only the divs keep asicminer's share price high.
If the shareprice really would be set because of future grows then activemining should be valued way higher i think.