It’s difficult to worry about one’s share price when it just keeps on going up, but Dr David Potter must be beginning to feel a little nervous at the way shares in his Psion Plc – up another 14 pence at mid-afternoon yesterday on 305 pence – have been defying gravity over the past few weeks: the current price puts the shares on a price-earnings ratio of about 17 times what is likely to be achievable not this year but in the year to end 1990, and that is placing unrealistic expectations on what is basically a very sound little company; Psion floated in March 1988 at 97 pence and a line of shares was placed at 145 pence late last year; the pent-up excitement is being generated by the forthcoming handheld MS-DOS machine, for which an extended battery life is promised, and while the new machine sounds like a hot property, there is a whole string of similar book-size MS-DOS machines being prepared for market.
