Wall Street Wants to Report Bad News Half as Often

For more than half a century, the rule has been ironclad: U.S. publicly traded companies report earnings every three months. It's been the metronome of Wall Street since 1970. But suddenly, that metronome is being questioned by exactly the people you'd expect—the ones who have to answer to it.

President Trump is pushing the Securities and Exchange Commission to move from quarterly to twice-yearly financial reporting. And it's working. TD Cowen analyst Jaret Seiberg is assigning 60% odds that the SEC actually implements the change.

The pitch is seductive. Companies argue that quarterly earnings obsession forces them to chase short-term metrics instead of, you know, actually running their businesses. Warren Buffett and Jamie Dimon co-wrote an op-ed backing the move. Save money, reduce noise, let executives focus. It sounds almost reasonable.

Except it's not. Let's be clear about what this actually is: a proposal to make bad news half as visible. If your company misses guidance, that's now a story every six months instead of every three. Earnings surprises become less frequent. Market-moving data gets sparser. Shareholders see half as many windows into how their money is actually being spent.

Wall Street is skeptical for good reason. Research shows that stock prices get more volatile when there's less frequent reporting. Which makes sense. Less information doesn't create calm—it creates uncertainty. Traders and investors start guessing. Guessing creates volatility. Volatility benefits people who can afford volatility.

The transparency argument collapses the moment you actually read it. "We need less frequent disclosure so we can be more transparent about what matters," is a sentence that shouldn't make it past a first draft. It's corporate speak for: we'd like to report our earnings when we've had time to properly explain why they're terrible.

This will probably happen anyway. The momentum is real. But let's not pretend it's about accountability or long-term thinking. It's about accountability happening less often. And in a world already drowning in corporate opacity, that's not a feature. It's a bug that costs $1,400 an hour to install.