Based on the peak to valley ratio (PTVR) of the average magnitude difference function (AMDF), we present a novel optical signal to noise ratio (OSNR) and symbol rate (SR) estimation method for commonly used auxiliary amplitude modulations (AAMs). Moreover, it is demonstrated that the influence of chromatic dispersion (CD) on the method can be mitigated by maximizing the PTVR of the AMDF with additional tunable dispersion compensators. The results of simulations show that the OSNR estimation error can be kept within 0.8 dB in the wide OSNR range of (12, 32) dB, while the SR estimation error is below 0.079% for four widely used 10 Gsymbol/s AAM signals.