Last weekend I was cleaning out a box of long-forgotten business research documents and notebooks that have travelled around with me from office to office over the years from Houston to Copenhagen, back to Houston, to Chicago, and ultimately back to Houston. As a broker and portfolio advisor in Denmark in part of 1995 and almost all of 1996, AOL was a company we either directly had accounts in, or, if not, we at least had to refer to it as "the" company to emulate when doing comparative analysis.

I found a Value Line research report from June 7, 1996, just over 10 years ago. Back then, AOL was not only independent, but it was not even listed on the NYSE -- the stock traded as AMER on NASDAQ. It was priced then at $54 and it had already had three two-for-one stock splits. Its market cap was deemed quite lofty at some $5.1 billion.

At that time you had to close your eyes if you were an investor because you almost never got to see the stock pull back that much. If it ever "went on sale" with more than a 10% correction, everyone piled in because they knew AOL was a beast.

Tomorrow we get the earnings lowdown from Time Warner Inc. (NYSE: TWX), and whether you are a bull or bear on TWX, tomorrow's results are going to be much more difficult to evaluate than in prior periods.

The Street expectations are $0.20 on earnings per share (EPS) and revenues of $11.08 billion. That's the official target. But the report may actually look highly different and be even harder to pick apart. It isn't just due to the complex nature of having several entirely different operating units under one stock. If that was the case companies like General Electric (GE), 3M (MMM), and Johnson & Johnson (JNJ) would be viewed with far more skepticism. No, the reason the report may be so hard to read is that this is the first real quarter to show a myriad of nearly simultaneous corporate changes.

Time Warner integrated Adelphia on the cable side and conducted the Comcast (CMCSA) asset swaps. We even saw the initial S-1 Filing for the mandatory IPO of Time Warner Cable into a public company of its own, and only the Adelphia holders are selling shares. In the last quarter we also saw the company end its ownership in Time Warner Telecom (TWTC) before the end of September. The company is in the process of spinning out its underperforming magazines and that has not yet been reached. It has reached separate agreements to divest all three of its AOL Europe units; and it has begun the long-haul migration of AOL as a closed system reliant on dial-up and broadband subscribers into a free service more reliant on advertising revenues.

The Guardian is reporting that AOL has put its French and German businesses up for sale, as hinted during the earnings conference call Wednesday morning [Sarah Gilbert's note: scroll all the way to the bottom and note: Wayne and Dick chuckled at the question from Citigroup analyst Jason Bazinet! Chuckled! They are so called out!].

The company will keep its British business, and continue to operate Internet portals in Germany and France.  According to the paper, AOL's operations in both countries have struggled against France Telecom and Deutsche Telekom. Citigroup is said to have been retained to sell the businesses, which analysts estimate to be worth a total of €700m (£480m).