Heard on the street: Discovery Zone, in a zone of its own, defies all market analysts and plans big expansion
There are only two pint-size things about Discovery Zone: the height of its 12-year-old-and-under customers, and its earnings.</br></br>Everthing else is big.</br></br>Stock-market value: $882 million, despite projected 1993 sales of only $50 million or so.</br></br>P/E multiple: For those still counting, at yesterday's Nasdaq close of 24 1/2, the stock trades at 350 times this year's expected per-share earnings of around seven cents.</br></br>When historians look back on this bull market, "Discovery Zone will be a period piece; we should savor it," says Jim Grant, who edits the acerbic Grant's Interest Rate Observer newsletter. Or, as Charles Ronson of Balestra Capital puts it: "It is beyond the realm of market analysis. It is into the realm of psychoanalysis."