William Hill shares dive 11% on earnings alert

(Close): William Hill shares shut down more than 11% after the bookie warned on earnings.

It said online trading had actually been struck by tougher policy and "the worst Cheltenham leads to recent history".

It now anticipates full-year operating profit to be between ₤ 260m and ₤ 280m, below ₤ 291.4 m last year. As an outcome, the FTSE 250 business saw its shares drop nearly 40p to 331p.

However, the benchmark FTSE 100 ended flat, up 6.4 points at 6199.1.

Top riser on the FTSE 100 was B&Q owner Kingfisher. Its shares ended up 6% in spite of reporting a 20% drop in full-year revenues to ₤ 512m.

However, when reorganizing expenses were stripped out, underlying earnings were a better-than-expected ₤ 686m.

William Hill said there were two main factors behind the weaker-than-expected performance from its online company.

It stated it had actually seen "a velocity in the number of time-outs and automated self-exclusions over current weeks", measures which allow punters to stop gambling with a bookie.

William Hill said that while the trend was "still evolving, we estimate that, should these patterns continue around present levels, the ensuing lower revenues will decrease online's revenues by ₤ 20-25m in 2016".

Secondly, its profit margins were lower than expected since of European football results and recently's Cheltenham horseracing festival, where bookmakers were hit by large a number of favourites winning races.

William Hill stated that regardless of its online issues, the more comprehensive group continued "to trade well" and remained in line with expectations.

The business likewise said it was in "innovative discussions" to purchase Openbet, a gaming software application company.

Sterling weak

Elsewhere on the London market, shares in Sports Direct were having another bad day, down a further 5.6% after dropping about 10% on Tuesday.

Earlier the yohaig code seller had actually released a statement stating that it anticipated full-year underlying incomes to be "at or around the bottom" of a previously approximated variety. The statement was provided following comments that creator Mike Ashley made to the Times newspaper on Tuesday.

On the currency markets, the pound remained weak after having actually fallen dramatically on Tuesday in the wake of the yohaig code fear attacks in Brussels, which were seen as increasing the yohaig code possibility of the yohaig code UK voting to leave the EU.

On Wednesday, sterling fell almost 1% against the dollar to $1.4087. Against the euro, it lost 0.4% to EUR1.2623.