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This is an awesome move. They’re not saying the reports go away—just moving them to every six months. After hating how each company runs on an internal quarterl

This is an awesome move. They’re not saying the reports go away—just moving them to every six months. After hating how each company runs on an internal quarterly cycle, I have to welcome it despite how the change originated. Six months is still short from the perspective of perverse incentives, but if you free up one week of charade from execs every 13 weeks, maybe they can focus better. And it’s not just execs, but the whole corporate machinery that takes 3–6 weeks after quarter end to churn out reports. Of course, internally executives should be tracking performance daily, but the quarter-end panic could lessen. If you have a bad quarter, you’re not penalized as much if the surrounding months are good. And anyway, if there is a material adverse change the companies should be expected to disclose, like they are expected now. Ps: I posted the same on Reddit a couple of hours back. Not AI but if you do find the account don't mention them online in the same sentence.

testbjjl 6mo ago
I see how it helps you and the company. What about investors who you borrowed money from.
- jmcgough 6mo ago
  Arguably better for everyone. Too much focus on short-term profits can harm long-term growth.
  - throw0101c 6mo ago
    > Arguably better for everyone. Too much focus on short-term profits can harm long-term growth. If you think quarterly reporting 'season' is crazy now, wait until it becomes semi-annual and the pressure is really on to hit analyst numbers. It'll be like New Year's Countdown on Results Release Day.
brendanyounger 6mo ago
What will actually happen is that frauds and poorly run companies will opt for the 6 month schedule while well run ones will keep the 3 month. To your point that "executives should be tracking performance daily", there's an argument that all that data should be publicly released daily. It would make it nearly impossible to hide mismanagement and actually remove most of the human overhead since it would be impossible to spin bad data on a daily basis.
- lokar 6mo ago
  IMO, it would be ok if it was not unconditional. If you have been public for >N years, and have had >X "clean" quarterly reports, no trouble with the SEC, etc, then sure, back off to 6mo (or even yearly, if your shareholders are ok with that). But if you have an audit problem, violate SEC rules, get any kind of conviction, hell, even an inditement, then back to quarterly until you clean it up.
  - runako 6mo ago
    > If you have been public for >N years, and have had >X "clean" quarterly reports, no trouble with the SEC, etc ...staff changes happen, incentives change due to changes in business performance. Enron was apparently clean public company from 1985 until sometime after Andrew Fastow was hired in 1990. If high-resolution transparency has any value, it doesn't make sense to do it a few times and then stop.
  - deleted 6mo ago
    [deleted]
- lich_king 6mo ago
  This is not how corporate fraud usually happens. You don't tamper with the quarterly report, especially since it gets audited. You tamper with the input data close to the source. For example, you record revenue that hasn't happened yet or you delay the recording of losses.
- skissane 6mo ago
  Releasing data at regular intervals gives people time to review the data, identify mistakes and rectify them. Releasing financial data daily, you are much more likely to release incorrect info and then have to go back and correct it. For certain types of firms, daily revenue figures are likely to reveal individual deals. Many B2B firms have a modest number of high value deals, a daily data feed might show $0 revenue one day $1.374 million the next, which is more likely a single deal of that size than two or more smaller deals-and that would reveal a lot to competitors-especially if those competitors are in other jurisdictions which haven’t mandated this form of extreme transparency
roxolotl 6mo ago
I have the opposite opinion. More information is always better. Absolutely the reporting requirements are onerous and there already are perverse incentives to chase things quarterly. Reducing reporting requirements is only going to make things worse though. The only solution I can imagine is to instead drop reporting requirements to instant. Make all public companies truly public. Reporting information should to be accessible via a feed 24/7. There can be no more perverse incentives if there’s no hiding. Insane and unlikely? Sure yea. But let’s not pretend that reducing information is going to help anything.
- jordanb 6mo ago
  Or even start with monthly. The problem with quarterly reporting is the internal efforts to "game" the quarter. The more aggressive disclosures are, the less of a shell game people can play to "make the report come out right." Moving it to bi-yearly does the opposite. CEOs can now do the same amount of gaming with half the effort. Or twice the gaming with the same effort. Should be obvious who this change is for.
  - jatins 6mo ago
    Yes, reporting should be a non event. This move will encourage bad behavior imo
- carlosjobim 6mo ago
  And now I know why surgeons spend more time filling out paperwork than treating patients. Now I know why I have to stand for 15 minutes at the hotel reception desk to check in to my already paid room, while the receptionist is typing away. Now I know why projects which should take one week to complete instead take 5 years.
throw0101c 6mo ago
> And it’s not just execs, but the whole corporate machinery that takes 3–6 weeks after quarter end to churn out reports. Release early, release often. If you want corporate machinery to run more smoothly with less effort, force it to operate more frequently not less: when TLS certs had 2-3 year lifespans there was all sorts of manual methods that people forgot how to do; then it was maximum one year. We then got free certs from LE (using ACME), but they were 90 days, so that made automation much more necessary. Now with certs from public CAs having a max time of 47 days soon (not that I'm necessarily a fan) automation is all but a must. So if you want less onerous effort on corporate reporting, your workflows and processes need to be much more automated: that's one of the reason why computers were invented after-all, to make computations faster. And one way to force automation is to insist on more frequent reporting, not less; Barry Ritholtz: > This is exactly backward: More frequent reporting makes the data less significant. In the real world, human behavior emphasizes what occurs less often—meaning doing something less frequently gives it an even greater significance than something that becomes routine or common. > That is the difference between a New Year’s Eve celebration and a married couple’s weekly date night. > Twice-a-year earnings reporting will make the event so momentous, with such focus on it, that any company that misses analysts’ forecasts will find their stock price shellacked. The twice-yearly focus on making the per-share number will become overwhelmingly intense. * https://www.fa-mag.com/news/reporting-profits-daily-would-end-short-termism-40430.html?section=232&page=1 https://www.fa-mag.com/news/reporting-profits-daily-would-en... Move from quarter / every-3-months to monthly reporting: companies will be forced to automate their "corporate machinery". And each report will be much less 'momentous' because the time between samples will be much less.
- nickff 6mo ago
  The problem with reporting often is that the reports must each be audited (which is time-intensive and expensive), and any errors subject the companies to class-action lawsuits (which only ever benefit the lawyers, but that is a separate matter). I would also prefer more frequent reports, but only if they were less burdensome and risky.
  - runako 6mo ago
btown 6mo ago
There's also just a mathematical way to look at volatility here, which is that if you look at (say) the average monthly result as a statistic for the reporting period, longer reporting periods have lower variance than shorter reporting periods. It's something of a diversification benefit - when you're able to smooth over months, as long as they're not all perfectly correlated (your shock just keeps hitting over and over and you can't stop it) - your results will have lower variance once normalized for elapsed time. What I can't speak to is whether this is a benefit to economic stability. Say an industry is shifting rapidly in a certain direction. Companies less able to adapt would be less quickly "punished" for that lack of adaptation. The question is whether that adaptation curve is "a company may need extra time and upfront investment in transformation, but can get back on the curve, so giving them grace helps to stabilize jobs and markets..." vs. "a company that falls off the curve will continue to fall behind, so faster reporting incentivizes companies to innovate and not get into an irrecoverable state that destroys value." And I think this question varies so widely between situations that it's difficult to standardize. Perhaps economists have looked at this more thoughtfully. Either way, this is an incredibly significant change - how so is a much more difficult question.
runako 6mo ago
> If you have a bad quarter, you’re not penalized as much if the surrounding months are good. GE used to smooth their earnings to accomplish exactly what you describe here. This was not good for investors, or transparency, or ultimately GE itself[1]. There's ample reason to want more frequent, not less frequent, results from companies. > the whole corporate machinery that takes 3–6 weeks after quarter end to churn out reports > internally executives should be tracking performance daily Executives would also be better served by having more timely access to the same data they will eventually disclose. Why would executives want to drive blind for more of the time? 1 - https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/warren-buffett-berkshire-hathaway-earnings-manipulation-jack-welch-ge-accounting-2023-2 https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/warren-buffe...
zzzeek 6mo ago
this is an incompetent, corrupt change that will be reversed when Trump leaves office in 2029. Companies should likely not change their quarterly reporting since it will only be temporary.
vmbm 6mo ago
Hard disagree. These are public markets we are talking about, which give companies access to financing from mom and pop investors. No one is forcing these companies to be public, they chose to be public because they wanted access to the liquidity provided by public markets. That liquidity is coming from folks retirement savings. I was following a company that did an ATM offering in January. By June, less than six months later, they had entered Chapter 11. Things can move fast in the business world. A financing deal falling through at the wrong time can be the difference between business as usual and bankruptcy. This change would largely benefit insiders and deep pocketed investors/funds that can afford bespoke data sources to fill in the gaps. And it feels like just another attempt by Wall street to force mom and pop investors into the role of dumb exit liquidity.
m463 6mo ago
I can't help but think of friends of mine that always complained about their quarterly OKR reports.
themafia 6mo ago
> After hating how each company runs on an internal quarterly cycle In 25 years of working professionally I've never felt this or heard this even once. > execs every 13 weeks, maybe they can focus better. I don't care about the struggles of executives. I'm entirely unconvinced that an additional two weeks a year will afford them enough "focus" to make any appreciable difference. > that takes 3–6 weeks after quarter end to churn out reports. We run a sales heavy organization. No one "churns" out reports and hasn't for decades. The biggest struggle is getting engineering to finalize their existing capital project reports. Everything else is automated to such an extent that I can't even fathom this scenario still existing.
Esophagus4 6mo ago
Absolutely. Quarterly reporting is enormously expensive. The average Nasdaq firm spend 850 hours per quarter purely on earnings. It’s absurdly burdensome. It is part of the reason companies don’t want to go public (it’s not the only reason, obviously). But the harder you make it for companies to go public, the more will stay in private markets. Then the only companies going public are going to be the ones that aren’t hot enough to stay private. Then retail will lose out on a lot of good growth companies. And you could say, “well let retail invest in private companies” but that makes the information asymmetry problem even worse. Because now instead of investing in companies with biannual reporting, retail is investing in companies with no reporting at all. I guess you could say “well make private companies have to report more” and now you’ve just created a public market again. https://www.businessinsider.com/quarterly-earnings-proposal-sec-accountants-lawyer-investor-relations-jobs-impact-2026-3 https://www.businessinsider.com/quarterly-earnings-proposal-...
kshacker 6mo ago
Reply to myself: This has been one of my more viral comments. Or controversial. Although I am not a karma farming kind, it was funny to see it get rated high, and then pull back more than half way. Yes it is controversial. I guess I was early, having written the same stuff at reddit an hour or 2 before it got posted here. I am not here to argue with anyone, just add a couple of comments. 1. I have heard people complain about quarterly mindset, I have started to believe into it too. Moving to 6 months does not change short term thinking, but it does change at the margins. Gives you breathing space. 2. Just because a pied piper is pushing for the change does not make it bad. At least for me. How it is executed of course will be a concern, but not who is doing it. If I supported this change yesterday, why would I flip now? 3. I am in the SRE world. I see countless people burning midnight oil generating reports ... like why is it important for yesterdays data to be available by 5 AM pacific when by the law of temporal physics, it does not arrive before midnight. 5 hours is all you get why? I know execs may be in NYC, but still ... why is it not a P2? Why is there a fire every day? The same SLA mentality carries over to quarterly reports. Maybe it is our well engineered just in time inventory mindset. You do not have data by this time, you lose a day here, then someone else loses a day, and pretty soon you need 2 more weeks in your supply chain, or in your financial reporting chain. 4. Yes the daily numbers should roll up into financial reports. But ... we also add all the compliance and make CEO and CFO liable for mis-reporting. Which means they need to look at the numbers, ask questions, get the gaps fixed. And not just them, they will have proxies of accountants doing this work. If you have legal liability, dont we think it costs exec (and subordinate) time? How can we say just roll the database data into financial reports? Has our group of hackers never had a bug or data corruption or system crash?

testbjjl 6mo ago

I see how it helps you and the company. What about investors who you borrowed money from.

jmcgough 6mo ago
Arguably better for everyone. Too much focus on short-term profits can harm long-term growth.
- throw0101c 6mo ago
  > Arguably better for everyone. Too much focus on short-term profits can harm long-term growth. If you think quarterly reporting 'season' is crazy now, wait until it becomes semi-annual and the pressure is really on to hit analyst numbers. It'll be like New Year's Countdown on Results Release Day.

brendanyounger 6mo ago

What will actually happen is that frauds and poorly run companies will opt for the 6 month schedule while well run ones will keep the 3 month. To your point that "executives should be tracking performance daily", there's an argument that all that data should be publicly released daily. It would make it nearly impossible to hide mismanagement and actually remove most of the human overhead since it would be impossible to spin bad data on a daily basis.

lokar 6mo ago
IMO, it would be ok if it was not unconditional. If you have been public for >N years, and have had >X "clean" quarterly reports, no trouble with the SEC, etc, then sure, back off to 6mo (or even yearly, if your shareholders are ok with that). But if you have an audit problem, violate SEC rules, get any kind of conviction, hell, even an inditement, then back to quarterly until you clean it up.
- runako 6mo ago
  > If you have been public for >N years, and have had >X "clean" quarterly reports, no trouble with the SEC, etc ...staff changes happen, incentives change due to changes in business performance. Enron was apparently clean public company from 1985 until sometime after Andrew Fastow was hired in 1990. If high-resolution transparency has any value, it doesn't make sense to do it a few times and then stop.
- deleted 6mo ago
  [deleted]
lich_king 6mo ago
This is not how corporate fraud usually happens. You don't tamper with the quarterly report, especially since it gets audited. You tamper with the input data close to the source. For example, you record revenue that hasn't happened yet or you delay the recording of losses.
skissane 6mo ago
Releasing data at regular intervals gives people time to review the data, identify mistakes and rectify them. Releasing financial data daily, you are much more likely to release incorrect info and then have to go back and correct it. For certain types of firms, daily revenue figures are likely to reveal individual deals. Many B2B firms have a modest number of high value deals, a daily data feed might show $0 revenue one day $1.374 million the next, which is more likely a single deal of that size than two or more smaller deals-and that would reveal a lot to competitors-especially if those competitors are in other jurisdictions which haven’t mandated this form of extreme transparency

roxolotl 6mo ago

I have the opposite opinion. More information is always better. Absolutely the reporting requirements are onerous and there already are perverse incentives to chase things quarterly. Reducing reporting requirements is only going to make things worse though. The only solution I can imagine is to instead drop reporting requirements to instant. Make all public companies truly public. Reporting information should to be accessible via a feed 24/7. There can be no more perverse incentives if there’s no hiding. Insane and unlikely? Sure yea. But let’s not pretend that reducing information is going to help anything.

jordanb 6mo ago
Or even start with monthly. The problem with quarterly reporting is the internal efforts to "game" the quarter. The more aggressive disclosures are, the less of a shell game people can play to "make the report come out right." Moving it to bi-yearly does the opposite. CEOs can now do the same amount of gaming with half the effort. Or twice the gaming with the same effort. Should be obvious who this change is for.
- jatins 6mo ago
  Yes, reporting should be a non event. This move will encourage bad behavior imo
carlosjobim 6mo ago
And now I know why surgeons spend more time filling out paperwork than treating patients. Now I know why I have to stand for 15 minutes at the hotel reception desk to check in to my already paid room, while the receptionist is typing away. Now I know why projects which should take one week to complete instead take 5 years.

throw0101c 6mo ago

> And it’s not just execs, but the whole corporate machinery that takes 3–6 weeks after quarter end to churn out reports. Release early, release often. If you want corporate machinery to run more smoothly with less effort, force it to operate more frequently not less: when TLS certs had 2-3 year lifespans there was all sorts of manual methods that people forgot how to do; then it was maximum one year. We then got free certs from LE (using ACME), but they were 90 days, so that made automation much more necessary. Now with certs from public CAs having a max time of 47 days soon (not that I'm necessarily a fan) automation is all but a must. So if you want less onerous effort on corporate reporting, your workflows and processes need to be much more automated: that's one of the reason why computers were invented after-all, to make computations faster. And one way to force automation is to insist on more frequent reporting, not less; Barry Ritholtz: > This is exactly backward: More frequent reporting makes the data less significant. In the real world, human behavior emphasizes what occurs less often—meaning doing something less frequently gives it an even greater significance than something that becomes routine or common. > That is the difference between a New Year’s Eve celebration and a married couple’s weekly date night. > Twice-a-year earnings reporting will make the event so momentous, with such focus on it, that any company that misses analysts’ forecasts will find their stock price shellacked. The twice-yearly focus on making the per-share number will become overwhelmingly intense. * https://www.fa-mag.com/news/reporting-profits-daily-would-end-short-termism-40430.html?section=232&page=1 https://www.fa-mag.com/news/reporting-profits-daily-would-en... Move from quarter / every-3-months to monthly reporting: companies will be forced to automate their "corporate machinery". And each report will be much less 'momentous' because the time between samples will be much less.

nickff 6mo ago
The problem with reporting often is that the reports must each be audited (which is time-intensive and expensive), and any errors subject the companies to class-action lawsuits (which only ever benefit the lawyers, but that is a separate matter). I would also prefer more frequent reports, but only if they were less burdensome and risky.
- runako 6mo ago

btown 6mo ago

There's also just a mathematical way to look at volatility here, which is that if you look at (say) the average monthly result as a statistic for the reporting period, longer reporting periods have lower variance than shorter reporting periods. It's something of a diversification benefit - when you're able to smooth over months, as long as they're not all perfectly correlated (your shock just keeps hitting over and over and you can't stop it) - your results will have lower variance once normalized for elapsed time. What I can't speak to is whether this is a benefit to economic stability. Say an industry is shifting rapidly in a certain direction. Companies less able to adapt would be less quickly "punished" for that lack of adaptation. The question is whether that adaptation curve is "a company may need extra time and upfront investment in transformation, but can get back on the curve, so giving them grace helps to stabilize jobs and markets..." vs. "a company that falls off the curve will continue to fall behind, so faster reporting incentivizes companies to innovate and not get into an irrecoverable state that destroys value." And I think this question varies so widely between situations that it's difficult to standardize. Perhaps economists have looked at this more thoughtfully. Either way, this is an incredibly significant change - how so is a much more difficult question.

runako 6mo ago

> If you have a bad quarter, you’re not penalized as much if the surrounding months are good. GE used to smooth their earnings to accomplish exactly what you describe here. This was not good for investors, or transparency, or ultimately GE itself[1]. There's ample reason to want more frequent, not less frequent, results from companies. > the whole corporate machinery that takes 3–6 weeks after quarter end to churn out reports > internally executives should be tracking performance daily Executives would also be better served by having more timely access to the same data they will eventually disclose. Why would executives want to drive blind for more of the time? 1 - https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/warren-buffett-berkshire-hathaway-earnings-manipulation-jack-welch-ge-accounting-2023-2 https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/warren-buffe...

zzzeek 6mo ago

this is an incompetent, corrupt change that will be reversed when Trump leaves office in 2029. Companies should likely not change their quarterly reporting since it will only be temporary.

vmbm 6mo ago

Hard disagree. These are public markets we are talking about, which give companies access to financing from mom and pop investors. No one is forcing these companies to be public, they chose to be public because they wanted access to the liquidity provided by public markets. That liquidity is coming from folks retirement savings. I was following a company that did an ATM offering in January. By June, less than six months later, they had entered Chapter 11. Things can move fast in the business world. A financing deal falling through at the wrong time can be the difference between business as usual and bankruptcy. This change would largely benefit insiders and deep pocketed investors/funds that can afford bespoke data sources to fill in the gaps. And it feels like just another attempt by Wall street to force mom and pop investors into the role of dumb exit liquidity.

m463 6mo ago

I can't help but think of friends of mine that always complained about their quarterly OKR reports.

themafia 6mo ago

> After hating how each company runs on an internal quarterly cycle In 25 years of working professionally I've never felt this or heard this even once. > execs every 13 weeks, maybe they can focus better. I don't care about the struggles of executives. I'm entirely unconvinced that an additional two weeks a year will afford them enough "focus" to make any appreciable difference. > that takes 3–6 weeks after quarter end to churn out reports. We run a sales heavy organization. No one "churns" out reports and hasn't for decades. The biggest struggle is getting engineering to finalize their existing capital project reports. Everything else is automated to such an extent that I can't even fathom this scenario still existing.

Esophagus4 6mo ago

Absolutely. Quarterly reporting is enormously expensive. The average Nasdaq firm spend 850 hours per quarter purely on earnings. It’s absurdly burdensome. It is part of the reason companies don’t want to go public (it’s not the only reason, obviously). But the harder you make it for companies to go public, the more will stay in private markets. Then the only companies going public are going to be the ones that aren’t hot enough to stay private. Then retail will lose out on a lot of good growth companies. And you could say, “well let retail invest in private companies” but that makes the information asymmetry problem even worse. Because now instead of investing in companies with biannual reporting, retail is investing in companies with no reporting at all. I guess you could say “well make private companies have to report more” and now you’ve just created a public market again. https://www.businessinsider.com/quarterly-earnings-proposal-sec-accountants-lawyer-investor-relations-jobs-impact-2026-3 https://www.businessinsider.com/quarterly-earnings-proposal-...

kshacker 6mo ago

Reply to myself: This has been one of my more viral comments. Or controversial. Although I am not a karma farming kind, it was funny to see it get rated high, and then pull back more than half way. Yes it is controversial. I guess I was early, having written the same stuff at reddit an hour or 2 before it got posted here. I am not here to argue with anyone, just add a couple of comments. 1. I have heard people complain about quarterly mindset, I have started to believe into it too. Moving to 6 months does not change short term thinking, but it does change at the margins. Gives you breathing space. 2. Just because a pied piper is pushing for the change does not make it bad. At least for me. How it is executed of course will be a concern, but not who is doing it. If I supported this change yesterday, why would I flip now? 3. I am in the SRE world. I see countless people burning midnight oil generating reports ... like why is it important for yesterdays data to be available by 5 AM pacific when by the law of temporal physics, it does not arrive before midnight. 5 hours is all you get why? I know execs may be in NYC, but still ... why is it not a P2? Why is there a fire every day? The same SLA mentality carries over to quarterly reports. Maybe it is our well engineered just in time inventory mindset. You do not have data by this time, you lose a day here, then someone else loses a day, and pretty soon you need 2 more weeks in your supply chain, or in your financial reporting chain. 4. Yes the daily numbers should roll up into financial reports. But ... we also add all the compliance and make CEO and CFO liable for mis-reporting. Which means they need to look at the numbers, ask questions, get the gaps fixed. And not just them, they will have proxies of accountants doing this work. If you have legal liability, dont we think it costs exec (and subordinate) time? How can we say just roll the database data into financial reports? Has our group of hackers never had a bug or data corruption or system crash?