To counsel someone to get out of a stock just after a 30 per cent crash in the shares may be seen as the investment advice of the charlatan. Especially a stock like Interserve that crashed 20 per cent in November over the same issue and had collapsed by a third back in May when the issue had first arisen.
But while the horse has not so much bolted as gone steeplechasing over hedges in the next county, there are very good reasons to get as far away from Interserve as possible.
After three attempts at explaining what has gone wrong in its fledgling £450 million waste incineration business — four, if you include a misguided statement of reassurance in August — Interserve yesterday admitted