Public companies have reported their financial results every three months for over half a century. A new SEC proposal would let them go dark for six months at a time. While the executives, lawyers, and big institutional investors still know exactly how the business is doing, you'd be the last to find out.
Tell the SEC: Keep Quarterly Reporting →A lot can go wrong in half a year. Failed product launches, ballooning debt, lawsuits, vanishing customers. Today the law forces companies to surface that information every quarter. Under the new rule, they can sit on it for six months at a stretch. Plenty of time for insiders to quietly sell their shares to you (or your ETF) before the bad news tanks the stock.
Enron. WorldCom. Madoff. The run-up to 2008. Every major modern accounting scandal was enabled by gaps and opacity in financial disclosure. Quarterly filings don't prevent fraud, but they dramatically shorten the window in which it can fester before someone outside the company can see it. What if Enron only had to cook their books twice a year?
The framing is voluntary, but the dynamics aren't. Once large companies start filing twice a year, smaller competitors face pressure to follow. They can't justify "more compliance than the bigger guy." Investor expectations adjust downward. What started as a choice quietly becomes the new normal. Almost no rule like this stays optional for long.
Companies still have to keep their books. They still have to brief their boards. The actual savings from skipping a public filing are modest legal and accounting fees, and those savings flow to the company and its executives. The cost of worse information falls on you, the person whose 401(k), IRA, or college fund holds the stock. That's a bad trade for ordinary investors.
“As a childhood cancer nonprofit, we rely on transparent and timely quarterly reporting to help assess the trajectory, stability, and scientific progress of biopharma companies developing promising therapies or contributing to the development of treatment.
Without this information, we would have misplaced donations, and wasted time that kids with cancer don't have.
There's more than just money on the line.”
“Quarterly reports are the single most important leveling mechanism between retail and institutional investors in U.S. equity markets. Institutional investors have expert networks, channel checks, alternative data, satellite imagery of retailer parking lots, credit card panel data, and direct management access through conferences and one-on-one meetings that cost more than most of our portfolios. We have the quarterly report.”
“I strongly agree that this is a bad move for individual investors — it creates opacity and undermines trust.”
That's the SEC's main argument for the change, but the evidence doesn't really support it. The UK and EU studied the move to semiannual reporting and found no meaningful improvement in long-term investment behavior. They did find more stock-price volatility and overreaction when reports finally arrived. Singapore tried it and is now reversing course because disclosure quality and trading volume both dropped. "Short-termism" is really about how CEOs are paid and how boards measure success, not how often companies file paperwork. Hiding the data doesn't fix the underlying problem; it just hides the consequences.
That's the SEC's argument. But the actual compliance savings are modest, and the cost of worse information flowing to ordinary investors is borne by the people the SEC is supposed to protect. There are also other ways to reduce reporting burden that don't degrade transparency for retail investors.
The SEC keeps citing the "global standard," but that standard isn't doing well in the places it was tried. The EU's lighter regime is where Wirecard's €1.9 billion fraud hid in plain sight for years before the company collapsed in 2020. The UK's 2014 shift stripped analyst coverage from mid-cap stocks, and London has been bleeding IPOs ever since. Singapore moved to semiannual reporting in 2020 and is now reconsidering, because trading volumes fell and disclosure quality dropped. The "global standard" the SEC is invoking isn't standard, isn't working, and is being walked back where it was tried.
Yes. Federal agencies like the SEC are legally required to consider comments from the public, and courts have overturned final rules when agencies failed to engage with substantive comments. Comments from real individual investors, describing real impact on real retirement accounts, directly answer the SEC's statutory mandate to protect "the investing public."
No. Plain-English comments from ordinary investors are exactly what the SEC needs to hear. You don't need to cite securities law. Saying something like "I'm a retail investor and I rely on quarterly reports to make decisions about my retirement savings" is genuinely valuable on the record.
Write in your own words. That matters more than any specific argument. A few angles that work: (1) you rely on quarterly information to make decisions, (2) longer gaps create an unfair advantage for corporate insiders, (3) "optional" doesn't fix the problem because companies that opt in are often the ones whose investors most need frequent updates, (4) the savings to companies aren't worth the cost to you.
Right now, on this rule, individual investors have an actual seat at the table. Take it.
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