888 is finally underperforming for once, with earnings for the first half of 2018 scheduled for release by the end of the month. Since May 1 just before the overturning of the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act, shares are down 8%. Compared to its gaming peers it hasn’t had a great quarter, at least not in terms of price action. William Hill is up 4.2%, Paddy Power Betfair is up 17%, and Sportech is up 16%. Even the FTSE 100 is up just barely. True, 888 outperforms all of them on a longer timeframe, but as investor attention spans get shorter and shorter, along with everyone’s attention span for that matter brought down to about the length of an average Tweet, the question always goes back to What have you done for me lately?

Now looks like a good entry point for a establishing or adding to an 888 position, though not all at once. There is still quite a bit of roller coaster ahead for the United Kingdom, and stocks of all shapes and sizes in all industries are going to be whipsawed back and forth all the way through April from here, probably including 888. What makes now a decent entry point is that 888 is over 30% below highs and doesn’t typically underperform for too long, so even if it goes down further from here, it probably won’t go down as much as its competitors.

Most UK gambling stocks began falling towards the last week of May. Blame it on misplaced euphoria from the overturning of PASPA when it began to sink in for investors that the United States is still, sort of but not really, a confederation of independent states, and that sports betting would have to be legalized in each of them separately for a market to exist. We were never going to see a unified, homogenous, American sportsbook market materialize overnight. Leave it to Great Britain to overlook that, being that King George is kind of the one that inspired the Founding Fathers, minus Hamilton but that’s another story, to forego a strong central government.

888 had the highest initial jump on the PASPA news due to the combination of it already having a small foothold in the US market and that its sports segment had been its fastest growing at 45% in 2017. That initial momentum may have contributed to bringing it down since. That, and as has happened several times in 888’s recent past, earnings had already been smashed by a tax that had nothing at all to do with any fundamentals surrounding its business operations. An additional fine levied for not filtering out self-excluded customers well enough brought exceptional charges in 2017 up to the stratospheric $51 million. Had it not been for those two unfortunate incidents, 2017 earnings would have been up on 2016 by about 15%. Instead they were down 68%.