Granted I did not account for pending 3% management fee from BTCT.co, nor for costs of electricity for doing your own mining, but wow ... hardly seems worth it to buy shares of AM-PT. Am I missing something?
The difference is that by investing in a miner you have a rapidly depreciating piece of hardware that will probably be a doorstop in 12 months. Doesn't make it a bad investment of course, if it pays for itself in 3 months and you make some profit over that.
The shares are effectively a stake in an enterprise which has current mining assets, future mining assets, products to be sold, an R&D budget to develop the next generation of technology, salaries, running costs, etc. If you price all those things out you can work out whether AM is a good investment or not. If friedcat put everything AM has into building out the current-gen tech and mining it until the return is uneconomic the weekly dividends would be way higher but it'd effectively be the same as the first scenario but on a much bigger scale. The weekly dividends would be superb for a while, then great, then OK, then marginal, then it wouldn't be worth it anymore.
AM have to plan how to use all of those assets to maximize the return to the business. To me they appear to clearly understand it's better to deploy the hardware in an orderly fashion, and trade a little bit of long-term profitability for short-term cash flow (e.g., recent blade sales) so they can fund R&D internally.
But in order to invest in AM you need to convince yourself that management understand all this and are rational. Their goal is to increase dividends over time, which takes more work than running a miner.