William Hill shares dive 11% on earnings alert

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

It stated online trading had actually been hit by tougher policy and "the worst Cheltenham results in recent history".

It now expects full-year operating profit to be between ₤ 260m and ₤ 280m, down from ₤ 291.4 m in 2015. As a result, the FTSE 250 business saw its shares drop almost 40p to 331p.

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

Top riser on the yohaig code FTSE 100 was B&Q owner Kingfisher. Its shares finished up 6% regardless of reporting a 20% drop in full-year earnings to ₤ 512m.

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

William Hill said there were 2 main elements behind the weaker-than-expected performance from its online organization.

It said it had seen "a velocity in the variety of time-outs and automated self-exclusions over current weeks", procedures which allow punters to halt betting with a bookie.

William Hill stated that while the trend was "still developing, we estimate that, should these trends continue around existing levels, the yohaig code following lower earnings will lower online's profits by ₤ 20-25m in 2016".

Secondly, its profit margins were lower than expected because of European football outcomes and last week's Cheltenham horseracing celebration, where bookmakers were hit by large a variety of favourites winning races.

William Hill stated that in spite of its online problems, the wider group continued "to trade well" and remained in line with expectations.

The company also stated it remained in "sophisticated conversations" to buy Openbet, a video 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 retailer had released a statement stating that it expected full-year underlying incomes to be "at or around the bottom" of a previously approximated range. The statement was released following comments that creator Mike Ashley made to the Times paper on Tuesday.

On the currency markets, the pound remained weak after having actually fallen sharply on Tuesday in the wake of the fear attacks in Brussels, which were viewed as increasing the probability 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.