US SEC Preparing To Scrap Quarterly Reporting Requirement (reuters.com) 66
The U.S. SEC is reportedly preparing a proposal to make quarterly earnings reports optional, potentially allowing companies to report results just twice a year. "The proposal could be published as soon as next month," reports Reuters, citing a paywalled report from the Wall Street Journal, adding that "regulators are in talks with major exchanges to discuss how their rules may need to be adjusted." Reuters reports: The SEC will vote on the proposal once it is published, after a public comment period which typically lasts at least 30 days, the report said. The WSJ report added that the rule is expected to make quarterly reporting optional and not eliminate it altogether. The proposed change in the reporting standard would allow listed companies to publish results every six months instead of the current mandate to report figures every 90 days.
Trump, who first floated the idea in his first term as president, has argued the change in requirements would discourage shortsightedness from public companies while cutting costs. Skeptics, however, caution delaying disclosures could reduce transparency and heighten market volatility.
Trump, who first floated the idea in his first term as president, has argued the change in requirements would discourage shortsightedness from public companies while cutting costs. Skeptics, however, caution delaying disclosures could reduce transparency and heighten market volatility.
Because (Score:4, Funny)
The economy is going to shit and now you'll only have to think about it twice a year
Re:Because (Score:5, Insightful)
Companies are gaming their finances and will only have to worry about hiding it twice a year.
Re: Because (Score:3)
But imagine the amount of profit potential it will create for the insider community.
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yeah sounds fair, no obvious historical references to why this was being done necessary at all.
Why not yearly? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Why not yearly? (Score:4, Insightful)
You may be onto something. The peons are starting to tire of record quarterly profits while at the same time being told by the company that higher wages cannot be afforded.
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The only thing that can reliably create higher wages is competition. When workers have a choice of where to work, companies must naturally compete for their labor. It's no different when you go to the store and have a variety of products available for purchase. Do you think the price would still be as low if there weren't alte
Re:Why not yearly? (Score:4, Insightful)
Publicly traded companies constitute less than 1 percent of all U.S. firms and about one-third of U.S. employment in the non-farm business sector. [nber.org]
The only thing that can reliably create higher wages is competition.
This is true but also if we are going to use market principles here we have to accept that there is a form of market failure in labor that has to be accounted for in that people have to work.
Unless you qualify for disability or SS you need a job to survive or its out on the street. A key aspect of a competitive market is the ability for the buyer to walk away from a purchase, not simply to have an alternative. With labor very few people have the option to not work so the power balance is in favor of employers. Two sellers competing for a buyer who is forced to buy from one of them is ripe for perverse incentives and collusion.
Alternatively they can leave and form their own company and as an owner be the one to keep all of that profit for themselves.
This is not realistic for a number of reasons. Those companies will need workers also.
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" A key aspect of a competitive market is the ability for the buyer to walk away from a purchase, not simply to have an alternative."
So it's your contention that a competitive market in food is impossible? It's a position that has been taken up, but it doesn't seem to generally end well.
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Agriculture and food is highly regulated and subsidized in the United States and most countries. Yes my contention is left to be a "free market" food would be something of a disaster.
Or what I'm really saying whatever competitive market for food we live in today is maintained by subsidy and regulation. State intervention is a necessary part of capitalism.
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Two sellers competing for a buyer who is forced to buy from one of them
Ahh the option of SaaS product 1 from company A or SaaS product 2 from company B - and once you've chosen, the 'competition' is how much it costs to move to another platform.
ripe for perverse incentives and collusion.
You're goddamn right.
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The only thing that can reliably create higher wages is competition. When workers have a choice of where to work, companies must naturally compete for their labor. It's no different when you go to the store and have a variety of products available for purchase. Do you think the price would still be as low if there weren't alternatives? Employees also have an easy path to realizing the gains of their employers for themselves by buying stock in the company. Many tech companies even pay employees by granting stock or stock options. Anyone who wants can become a partial owner of a publicly traded company and reap the rewards of profitable quarters themselves. Alternatively they can leave and form their own company and as an owner be the one to keep all of that profit for themselves.
What you say sounds reasonable only if the power balance between employers and employees weren't so heavily skewed in employers favor. History shows that the only reason employers ever showed any consideration towards their employees is because of government regulation.
Go back to the latter half of the 19th century and the first decade or two of the 20th and you'll find lots of instances of employers not giving a rat's ass about their employees. Lose a leg in a steel plant due to the company being too c
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And then you should look at Ford who paid their employees wages high enough to allow them to buy a Ford. Circular money.
I can't be sure if that was sarcasm, but that myth about Ford's rationale for paying higher wages is not true. Ford was dealing with 370% annual turnover and had to do something to keep people in such mind-numbing repetitious jobs. Within a year of increasing wages turnover dropped to 16% and production levels increased 40% (mostly because they could consistently fill third shift positions).
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I do sometimes choose an item that is not the cheapest in the store for reasons of quality.
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I do sometimes choose an item that is not the cheapest in the store for reasons of quality.
That's not the same thing. The question was perhaps a little vague but it was still pretty clear he meant paying more than the sticker price.
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I do sometimes choose an item that is not the cheapest in the store for reasons of quality.
That's not the same thing. The question was perhaps a little vague but it was still pretty clear he meant paying more than the sticker price.
Although with your "tips mandatory" culture, nobody seems to have a problem paying more than what's printed on the price-tag.
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The only thing that can reliably create higher wages is competition.
And the fed is careful to manipulate the market to keep unemployment from falling "too" low.
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It does widen the gap for insider information and trading on it -- which does screw the little guy (or at least little guy traders). If you're a long term investor this really should not make a difference.
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It does widen the gap for insider information and trading on it -- which does screw the little guy (or at least little guy traders). If you're a long term investor this really should not make a difference.
It doesn't just screw over the little guy. It screws over retirees that are in the phase of their life where they are selling assets for income.
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It doesn't just screw over the little guy. It screws over retirees that are in the phase of their life where they are selling assets for income.
Are retirees looking at quarterly reports before selling assets? I would generally say "no" especially since most of these are going to be a 401k where the assets are sold evenly to cover a withdrawal.
Re:Why not yearly? (Score:4, Insightful)
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You fix the system by adding a SALES TAX to trades. common sense. also; real business that actually does something, pays really high transactional taxes. Credit cards take 2%... did internet business die off when cash is impossible? Oh, I remember when I had to pay $30 to make a stock trade. each time. and the stock market died completely! (sarcasm)
The robots do millisecond trading already those reports don't matter much and if they did it monthly and just output data to shareholders without a bunch of smo
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You fix the system by adding a SALES TAX to trades
And how is this a fix? Capital gains are already taxed; double taxing transactions seems like overreach.
Oh, I remember when I had to pay $30 to make a stock trade. each time. and the stock market died completely! (sarcasm)
That was not a tax. That was the fees you had to pay to the brokerage.
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Why not just switch to yearly reporting? Companies can still report more often, but if it allows companies to hire managers that aren't constantly chasing quarterly results at the expense of long term prospects, it's better for everyone other than investors that like to profit off of valuation swings from quarterly earnings reports. ...
Even more efficient, how about never? Certainly shareholders can simply rely on "Trust me bro." /s
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One year is not a "long term prospect". The problem is you can't report truly long term strategy while also providing meaningful information to investors who demand to see returns.
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Re:Why not yearly? (Score:5, Interesting)
The quarterly report standard was set to ensure that the public is sufficiently well-informed about the fiscal health of publicly traded companies prior to their making investment decisions. Moving to a 6-month cycle increases the knowledge gap between the general public and those with inside knowledge.
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An effective open market depends on accurate and reliable information being available to all participants. The myth is that exists in a form accessible to all -- the reality is that insider information is not publicly available to all, why using it to profit is still (mostly) considered a crime. Quarterly earnings reports are marketing products, not an audit. It is the rare company that does not fine tune what it reports. And emotion rather than analytics drives most investment decisions. My initial reactio
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The believe the main reason is because semiannually is the standard in the rest of the Western world, so if a change is made it makes sense to align with that. About half of EU public companies now file semiannually after they changed their regulations in 2013.
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Why not just switch to yearly reporting? Companies can still report more often, but if it allows companies to hire managers that aren't constantly chasing quarterly results at the expense of long term prospects, it's better for everyone other than investors that like to profit off of valuation swings from quarterly earnings reports. Those people aren't creating anything of real value anyway so why should I care if they have to find something more useful to do?
The problems are not being caused by the existance of quarterly reports, rather with what certain people demand of them. Ever increasing growth and profit at the expense of everything else.
Getting rid of the reporting won't make change this one iota... It just makes it easier to hide the poor state of the economy and potential wrong doings of rich people.
Bad Idea (Score:2)
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How about decadely reports, then? It's so much hassle reporting all the time; just do it once every ten years!
Banning shorting too couldn't hurt (Score:2, Informative)
Shorting brings nothing of value but can destroy the value of a company due to diluting confidence just so some fucking hedge fund can make a killing.
Information Hiding (Score:5, Insightful)
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For example one would think that the number of iphones sold would be pretty important to know.
Why? As a stock holder what you're interested in isn't the number sold, but the revenue generated, and you want to see the number going up. I get what you're saying but it's ultimately a different number that is a proxy for what is important and provides little to no meaningful information that the likes of IDC isn't already providing in their forecasts.
Was the number 100,000 or 300,000? Does it matter? What if the 100,000 units of the new phone sold this year is the iPhone Pro Max and has a $400 margin, co
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Was the number 100,000 or 300,000? Does it matter?
Yes, it matters. Even if Apple's revenue depended entirely on hardware sales, relying on fewer sales at higher margins is a concern for future stability. Fewer sales suggest that Apple's products are becoming less attractive to consumers. Competitive pressures could force lower margins. But Apple also takes a big cut of App Store purchases. Fewer customers means fewer sales in the app store not just in the current quarter but going forward.
Mixed feelings.. (Score:5, Interesting)
I have mixed feelings on this.
On the one hand, reducing modern businesses chasing short-term results over longer term goals is a good thing.
On the other hand, reporting less often to share holders feels like "Trust me, bro."
Overall, I think that for most businesses, detailed annual reporting is the sweet spot. It gives enough time to actually accomplish something -or at least make meaningful progress. It is not so long that we (as investors) forget what they promised in the previous report.
It's All Bullshit Anyway (Score:3)
It's all bullshit anyway.
I find the quarterly reporting to be too fast of a cadence. It introduces a lot of market volatility. So, shifting to biannually seems like a good idea.
But, the reality is that it probably won't matter much. Just as we have now, the important information always gets leaked to insider "analysts" and the trading takes place before the earnings announcement. So, I'm not sure how much volatility will actually be reduced since companies will probably leak more frequently than biannually.
This is already standard in Europe (Score:3)
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Yeah but I have it on good authority that Europe is a third world hellhole with poor leadership. So sayeth the arbiter of TRUTH.
Post semi-annually if you want (Score:2)
Not holding stock in any companies that don't report quarterly, especially ones that haven't earned trust through stability. I might not care about a Berkshire Hathaway, but no tech stocks would fit the category.
Accountability (Score:2)
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Should be just a small cap exception (Score:2)
There is no reason why mega cap companies can't report quarterly. A company worth $100 billion+ has armies of accountants on staff in addition to securities lawyers and the like. It's not much imposition to give quarterly reports.
But the burden of reporting does cause problems for small and micro-cap companies. It no longer makes sense for a $20-200 million company (and frankly probably not for any company under several billion) to go public because compliance is quite burdensome for companies of that size.
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" the burden of reporting"
The marginal costs don't need to be high, since it's all information that an actual capitalist would want to track about their firm anyway.
I suppose that no longer making it mandatory will make it easier to separate the actual capitalists from the mercantilists and ideologues.
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It is, but compiling that data according to SEC/GAAP requirements is still a big project for a small company. It generally requires several weeks of work for a dedicated team. No big deal if you have 10,000 employees and 200 accountants on staff. It's a problem if your entire accounting team is occupied for weeks at a time just compiling data for the 10Q instead if doing all of the other work of the company.
Six months seems reasonable (Score:2)
You should be able to flee to a friendly country to evade extradition,
launder your cash, pay off the congressmen, and get the surgery,
in under half a year, easy.
The U.S. Financial System (Score:2)
just eliminate reporting requirements entirely (Score:3)
that's what wall street really wants: imaginary values for stocks with zero basis in reality. that's what we've got with all this AI investment. what could possibly go wrong?
Put aside any pro/con Bad Orange Man feelings... (Score:3)
The filings used to be semi-annual, and people in BOTH parties have long wondered if the shift to quarterlies was a contributing factor in the shift to short-term thinking in corporate board rooms. Nobody will admit it, but nobody knows for sure. Switching to semi-annual is NOT some weird revolutionary thing; it's a reversion to the way things used to be. Sadly, we'll never know for sure if if it matters since any change in corporate board room behavior which correlates with this change back will likely be clouded by other matters. Complexity is always the enemy of the simple-minded.
Probably the only real shake-out from this change will be a reduction in paperwork and government-mandated man-hours of busy work for accountants and execs.
Now, require shareholders to hold for 6 months too (Score:2)
High frequency trading is a scourge to the stock trading system. It trades only on fluctuations, not on business fundamentals.
If we made it a requirement to hold stock for 6 months to avoid a penalty (like owning a CD for example), that would help stabilize businesses and encourage them to think more long term.
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1) if Trump is for it, it's likely BAD.
2) It should be monthly, some decent experts suggested monthly and I'd go with them
3) The AI stock traders that handle big investors which run in milliseconds are not going to care about what you do. The real fix is to add a SALES TAX to stock trades like every other part of the economy must deal with. They are not doing real business anything yet they are tax free! While real business transactions have to pay sales taxes. Wise politicians proposing such things are
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I like your sales tax concept, I'd vote for it!
Why not continuous reporting? (Score:4, Interesting)
Why isn't the report automated? (Score:2)
It should be publishable monthly.
Less frequent information is not better for the public. It's better for the companies.