Good morning, it's Paul here.

To get you started today, I finished off yesterday's report in the evening, with a new section (a reader request) on Northern Bear (LON:NTBR) . Here is the link to that report, if it interests you.

At some point this week, I'm wanting to look at results last week from GAME Digital (LON:GMD) , Tracsis (LON:TRCS) , and £GATC 




IQE (LON:IQE)

Share price: 67p (down 29% yesterday, at close)
No. shares: 776.0m
Market cap: £519.9m

Profit warning yesterday - thank you to the readers who flagged this up in the comments yesterday. This profit warning was issued at 4:20 pm, i.e. just 10 minutes before the market closed to go into the 5 minute closing auction.

I imagine that the share price is likely to continue falling today, because many private investors won't have seen the profit warning in time to take any action in just 10 minutes. It's just not right that profit warnings can be put out during market hours. That creates a false market, and is unfair to ordinary private investors, who get the news later than city insiders who are screen-watching every second of the day.

Rather than issuing a profit warning during market hours, companies should instead be compelled to temporarily suspend a share, then publish the profit warning after hours. Then resume trading at 8 am in the morning, once everyone has had a fair chance to read the announcement.

The news looks pretty bad to me;

IQE plc issues this trading update in response to reports made by a major chip company in the VCSEL supply chain on 12th November 2018 that they had received notice from one of their largest customers for 3D sensing laser diodes to materially reduce shipments for the current quarter.

The Company is currently assessing the impact of this news but at this stage, it expects there will be a material reduction in its financial performance in the current year.


My opinion - I'm keeping away from this share these days, having realised some time ago that I don't really understand the company well enough to be sure either way.…

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