AOL INC. Shares Now Open to the Public

The reborn AOL INC. (NYSE:AOL) is now ready for trading and heading into the lunch hour shares are at $23.17.  Shares of AOL are down around 14% since the initial spinoff last month at $27 per share.

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 last month at $27 and finished its first week down 14% to $23 even (its been around that price ever since). Today we all get our chance to trade AOL on the NYSE and there may be cause to celebrate an independent AOL.

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

AOL has a market cap of $2.5 billion and there are 107.72 million shares available. 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 -- 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.

Get ready to watch AOL, the Nation will and we advise you to do the same.

Disclaimer: No positions in any of the securities mentioned in this publication.