Welcome Back AOL to the New York Stock Exchange

America Online is now just AOL (NYSE:AOL) and the company is officially on its own again after the split from Time Warner (NYSE:TWX).  Shares of AOL started trading on Tuesday at $27 and finished its first week down 14% to $23 even.  The public will get its chance to trade AOL on Dec 10th and there may be cause to celebrate and independent AOL.

Right now you can track the performance of AOL on Google Finance under the ticker AOL* - click here to access.

AOL finished Friday at $23 a share, that gives the company a market cap of $2.4 billion. The analyst opinion on AOL puts shares above $30 per share:

Barclays last week asserted that AOL's fair value is 35 to 39 a share; RBC's sum-of-the-parts estimate suggests the stock is worth 27 a share; Bernstein splits the difference and puts AOL's value at 30. Hudson Square Research analyst Todd Rethemeier noted in a report that AOL this year bought back a 5% stake in it held by Google for $283 million-equal to 53.54 a share.

Eric Savitz from Barron's did a great write-up on AOL's past, present, and future this weekend -- click here to read.  Savitz points out:

AOL's $2.4 billion market cap buys a little under $1 billion in projected 2010 cash flow; alternatively, $1.7 billion would buy both EarthLink and United Online, which together throw off half as much cash, and whose brands-Classmates, FTD, Juno, NetZero-pack a lot less punch than AOL, Mapquest, ICQ and Moviefone. AOL's dream of being a world-beating media monster is long gone. But the early trading in its stock suggests that the market's distaste for the AOL story has created a serious bargain.

Come Dec 10th, get ready for AOL to enter the big time as it will soon belong to the fate of Wall Street traders.