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.