I can tell it's near a bottom because AOL continues to collect more subscribers and continues to be a dominant player, yet people are beginning to say that AOL will be dead money until Time Warner is absorbed, and AOL will now have a lot of debt, and has problems now that it is a media company, when media was never its strong point in the first place. Only newbies use AOL, and they graduate from using its content in favor of other sources. Blah blah blah. I believe in AOL, and while all these things will hinder it for a while, I think the negativity means that it is a buying opportunity. You didn't see negative talk when AOL was trading higher and higher into its latest stock split.
People are always on the wrong side at the wrong time.
Hell, today AOL was even downgraded. AOL is an ATM machine. We're talking the biggest subscriber base in the world, deals with serving up access to other countries, and now high bandwidth via Time Warner. They take on the exposure and problems associated with Time Warner, but they also become the first major Internet to get involved with the world offline. It is an online broker, but it offers most everything that you want to get your hands on besides a personal broker.