Trump and some of Wall Street’s power players reignite a decades-old question: Should companies be judged every three months, or twice a year?
Corporate America is once again at odds over whether to maintain its 50-year tradition of quarterly reporting or join Europe and parts of Asia in adopting a semi-annual schedule.
It’s not the first time for this debate. President Donald Trump brought it up during his first term, but nothing came of it. This time, Trump is joined by Wall Street power players like JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon in championing the idea.
At stake is nothing less than the rhythm of American business. Every quarter, earnings season arrives like clockwork: a high-stakes ritual in which CEOs and CFOs parade their numbers, hype their narratives, and face a barrage of analysts’ questions. The spectacle moves markets, shapes careers, and, critics contend, forces companies into a cycle of short-term thinking. Missing an earnings report requires additional paperwork and, perhaps, the threat of delisting.
The notion of fewer earnings reports hasn’t sat well with some finance veterans, however.
Short-seller Jim Chanos, known for exposing Enron’s accounting transgressions, blasted efforts to loosen disclosure rules as a “gift to corporate opacity,” particularly Trump’s suggestion that the US could emulate China’s semi-annual model. “China should not be a model for American financial oversight,” Chanos warned on X.
Former Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers was equally blunt, calling the proposal “a bad idea whose time should never come.” He added, “America’s capital markets have thrived precisely because of their accountability and transparency…frequent accountability and substantial sharing of information have been central to that.”
Still, while Summers and Chanos want to uphold the earnings season pastime, several corporate advisors opined that the appeal of less frequent reporting is simpler than that: cost savings.
The Cost Of Compliance
For Aslam Rawoof, partner at Benesch Friedlander Coplan & Aronoff, filings are about transparency as well as scale.
“I don’t think that a one-size-fits-all approach makes sense for every single company,” he says of the Securities and Exchange Commission’s (SEC) current quarterly Form 10-Q requirements. For smaller firms with limited resources, quarterly reporting is an added strain.
“I have clients that run the gamut from a market cap of $10 million to $8 billion,” Rawoof says. “For some of the smaller clients, forcing them to do quarterly reporting costs a lot of money because oftentimes they don’t have any in-house lawyers: so all the work is being done by external counsel.”
The legal tab alone can be daunting. Securities law, Rawoof notes, isn’t something one can “dabble in.” Companies must go to Wall Street-caliber firms, and those don’t come cheap.
“Then there’s the auditors,” he says. “They don’t provide an audit opinion on quarterly numbers, but even their reviews can cost tens of thousands of dollars. I’ve seen quotes of $75,000 per quarter for an auditor review.”
Those recurring costs add up quickly, with some reported estimates exceeding $1 million for companies with a market cap of over $10 billion.
“So, I can see where this proposal makes sense,” Rawoof says. “The idea isn’t to end quarterly reporting altogether, it’s just to make it optional. If a company wants to report twice a year, it should be allowed to.”
SEC Chair Paul Atkins downplayed the relevance of the 10-Q in a TV appearance in September. “Professionals,” he explained, tend to prefer the earnings calls: “scripted sorts of events to make sure that everything from the company’s perspective meshes with what their overall disclosure is.”
Atkins thinks it’s a good time “to look at the whole panoply of ways that people get information, how it’s disseminated, and what’s fit for purpose.”
A Populist Twist On Corporate Reform
The question of how often public companies should report their earnings has always been closely tied to the larger debate about corporate short-termism.
In 2015, then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton addressed “quarterly capitalism” while on the US presidential campaign trail. The obsession with short-term profits, she said, led companies to cut pay and forward-looking investments just to meet investors’ expectations.
Last month, the Long-Term Stock Exchange (LTSE) took up the cause and petitioned the SEC to give companies the option to report semi-annually.
The move would be seismic. Since 1970, when the SEC first introduced the 10-Q, US public companies have been required to disclose their results every three months. The system was born out of a post-Depression-era desire for accountability. Today, critics say it fuels short-termism, volatility, and burnout.
With envy, they look abroad. In Asia, most markets rely on annual and semi-annual disclosures. China allows quarterly results, but primarily for investor relations. Hong Kong requires annual and half-year reports, and Singapore, Malaysia, and South Korea generally follow a semi-annual schedule, with quarterly updates optional and mostly provided by large-cap companies.
The European Union banned mandatory quarterly reporting in 2013, arguing it encouraged short-termism. The UK followed suit, and while investors initially feared less transparency, markets adapted.
Europe’s six-month schedule “works fine in that context,” says Omar Choucair, CFO of Trintech, a financial software provider, and a former KPMG executive. “But for US markets, quarterly reporting has become best practice. It keeps investors informed and management teams disciplined.”
Still, Choucair sees an upside: Semi-annual reporting would lower compliance costs and “encourage” IPOs.
Over the past 25 years, the number of publicly listed US companies has fallen by nearly half while the number of private equity-backed firms has surged more than 500%, according to PitchBook. The result: fewer IPOs, more concentration risk, and shrinking opportunities for everyday investors. Just three companies—Apple, Microsoft, and Nvidia—now account for 17.5% of the entire US stock market, up from 4.2% in 2015.
“We could see more IPOs,” Choucair argues. “Because the investment required to go public and to stay compliant would be lower.”
Pierson Ferdinand partner Julie Herzog agrees—up to a point.
“Today’s IPO hesitation is driven by valuation uncertainty, rates/volatility, litigation risk, research coverage dynamics, and abundant private capital,” she contends. “Cutting quarterlies doesn’t solve those frictions.”
In practice, she predicts, underwriters and institutional investors would still demand quarterly-style updates through 8-Ks.
“For micro- and small-caps, cost relief could help,” she concedes. “But any opacity premium the market applies can erase the benefit.”
‘Keep The Rhythm’
Quarterlies keep investors informed, prevent manipulation, and ensure comparability across companies, supporters maintain.
“Markets function best when participants share frequent, standardized baselines,” Herzog says. Reducing cadence increases monitoring costs, widens spreads, and raises the cost of capital, “often more than the savings on filings.”
The real solution for short-termism, she argues, isn’t fewer quarterlies.
“It’s smarter reporting,” she says. “Keep the rhythm, streamline the content, and reweight the conversation toward medium-term value creation rather than penny-perfect quarters.”
A hybrid model may offer the best of both worlds. “Scaled disclosure is sensible if designed carefully,” Herzog contends.
Large, accelerated filers should keep quarterly reporting, she envisions. After all, they have the potential to move markets. Smaller issuers could shift to semi-annual 10-Qs if paired with mandatory quarterly KPI updates and clear liquidity disclosures.
Such a tiered system eases the burden for smaller companies while preserving transparency for the largest. During M&A activity or financing rounds, banks and buyers would still demand quarterly-quality data. But for micro firms struggling under compliance costs, semi-annual reports could be a lifeline.
Whether the LTSE’s proposal will gain traction remains uncertain. Many see it as a long-shot bid by a smaller exchange to differentiate itself from the NYSE and NASDAQ. Yet, Atkins’s remarks suggests the winds may be shifting.
The Big Four accounting firms would likely feel the pinch, observers note. Deloitte, EY, KPMG, and PwC currently earn millions from quarterly review work, and halving the reporting cadence could shrink that revenue stream. Some industry leaders stress, however, that the shift would have broader consequences.
For Victoria Woods, CEO of ChappelWood Financial Services, such a drastic change might strain the financial system long-term. The only way to know for sure? “Try it.”
“I would like to see a phased approach where a handful of firms across multiple market sectors test the concept of semi-annual earnings reports,” she says. “If investors accept it, roll it out over time to the broader market. If they don’t, maintain the status quo.”
