title - What is a profit warning ? Hi! In this video I'm going to look at profit warnings; what they are and what you should do if one of your companies does warn on profit. So what exactly is a profit warning? Well, I looked at Wikipedia just quickly before I starting shooting this video. They said a profit warning is when a company will make lower profits this year than it made last year. Actually, though, sorry Wikipedia - that's wrong. What a profits warning actually is, is when a company knows that this year it's going to make profits that are lower than the current market expectations, the current analysts' expectations if you like. We’ve already looked at analysts, but what are City analysts? Basically these guys - and they're mostly guys - are highly-paid number crunches who issue ‘buy’, ‘sell’, and ‘hold’ ratings on companies. They also give forecasts on what profits are expected to be this year, next year, and the year after. Normally, these analysts chat with the company involved and get some guidance from the finance directors. The finance director would never give them a precise figure of what the profits are going to be; they guide analysts toward the right ballpark. When you've got a big company - someone like Tesco - you'll have 20 or 30 analysts following the company, so you'll get lots of different forecasts. You average out those forecasts and you get the consensus expectation for that company’s profits for this year and for next year. If the company concerned knows that the forecast is wrong, they've got to tell the market immediately. The expectations need to be changed. So the company issues a profit warning. Now, if you want to find out what the analysts' expectations are, even in the City, they will just be able to quickly find the figure on their Bloomberg or Reuters screens. But private investors can also find these numbers. Go to the Yahoo Finance website. If you're interested in Tesco, go to the Tesco page on Yahoo Finance. There you'll see links on the left-hand side, including one saying “analysts’ estimates”. Look at that link, and you'll see the market estimate for what Tesco is going to do this year. If Tesco thinks that's wrong, it issues a profit warning. If it thinks the market estimates are too low, then again, the company should tell the market. When you get a positive warning, that's a ‘profit upgrade’ or an ‘earnings upgrade’. You own a company where there has been a profit warning. How do you react? If you as an investor want to see the statement that the company's put out to the market - the profit warning or the profit upgrade - you can find it on a great website called Investigate. That has all the different statements that every stock market company ever puts out. So if you see in the press that a company you own has issued a profits warning and you want to read exactly what the company says, go to Investigation and you can read the statement itself. So, fine; you own a company where there has been a profit warning. How do you react? Do you immediately sell your shares, do you wait a little while, or do you just carry on holding it for the long term? Well, the first point to make that's really important here is that no matter how quickly you react to the profit warning, you're going to be too late in terms of beating that immediate fall in the share price. As soon as the profit warning comes out, as soon as trading begins after the profit warning, you'll see an immediate fall in the share price; just like that. You can't beat it, and you won't be able to sell your shares at the pre-warning price. Or it's highly unlikely, anyway. So don't try to do that; you won't be able to. So what do you have to do if the profits warnings come out, and you've seen the share price has fallen? Do you just panic and bail out, or do you decide to hold on? The crucial point is don't panic. Stay calm, then decide what you're going to do. Analyse it bit deeper. Now, it may be the case that the profit warning is actually an example of what's known as ‘kitchen sinking’. We saw an example of that last week when Shell put out a profit warning. Now, until last week, Shell hadn't issued a profit warning since 1998. But the company just hired a new chief executive - Ben van Beurden. He's only been doing the job for three weeks, and he's decided to put out a profit warning really quickly. That often happens with new bosses because they want to start from a low base. They want things to look really bad when they start and then when things improve they'll look better - they'll get all the glory for doing a fantastic job. So he'll look for all the problems, he'll write down the value of the assets on the company's balance sheet. He'll throw everything out, including the kitchen sink, to make things look really, really bad.

• published: 20 Oct 2016
• views: 150