William Hill Shares Dive 11% On Profit Alert William Hill shares dive 11% on revenue alert (Close): William Hill shares shut down more than 11% after the bookie cautioned on earnings. It said online trading had been hit by harder policy and "the worst Cheltenham leads to recent history". It now anticipates full-year operating profit to be between ₤ 260m and ₤ 280m, down from ₤ 291.4 m in 2015. As an outcome, the FTSE 250 company 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% regardless of reporting a 20% drop in full-year earnings to ₤ 512m. However, when restructuring expenses were stripped out, underlying earnings were a better-than-expected ₤ 686m. William Hill stated there were 2 main aspects behind the weaker-than-expected performance from its online service. It stated it had actually seen "an acceleration in the variety of time-outs and automated self-exclusions over current weeks", procedures which permit punters to stop betting with a bookmaker. William Hill said that while the trend was "still evolving, we approximate that, ought to these trends persist around present levels, the ensuing lower incomes will decrease online's earnings by ₤ 20-25m in 2016". Secondly, its earnings margins were lower than expected due to the fact that of European football results and recently's Cheltenham horseracing festival, where bookies were hit by big a number of favourites winning races. William Hill said that regardless of its online issues, the wider group continued "to trade well" and was in line with expectations. The company also said it was in "innovative discussions" to buy Openbet, a video gaming software application company.