Delivery failure

The reason I am returning to this trusty old topic is that ­scuttlebutt would have worked rather nicely for me this week, even if it would have required me to be rather quick off the mark. The company in question was the logistics operator DX, whose shares fell more than 60 per cent after a severe profit ­warning and a cancelled ­dividend on Tuesday. DX had been responsible for delivering two items of bathroom furniture to my house at the end of last week. Somehow or other, it managed to leave half the order at its depot. While I accept that businesses make mistakes, as an investor I know that such mistakes can be costly in an industry rife with overcapacity and working on wafer-thin margins. In the case of DX, we already knew it had problems; we have been negative on the shares for some time. A botched delivery offered a clue that these were far from resolved.