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> 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

> 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 7mo 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 7mo ago
  Longer periods between audited (aka "accurate") results will lead to compounding errors. Fewer people at the company will have a clear idea of how the company is doing. Audits are like CI for finances.
  - nickff 7mo ago
    I agree that would be preferable if reporting were less expensive and (legally) risky, and what you're describing is definitely closer to the original intent of the rule (that of giving investors the information available to management), but it would make being a public company even more burdensome than it already is, and the number of public corporations is already in decline.
    - HeWhoLurksLate 7mo ago
      how much of that decline is due to mergers vs failing vs new private companies being formed instead?
    - runako 7mo ago
      > it would make being a public company even more burdensome than it already is Every company doesn't have to be public. The US taxpayer underwrites US securities markets, and companies that trade on our public markets have access to some of the deepest pools of low-cost liquidity in the world. But companies are obviously free to list elsewhere. > the number of public corporations is already in decline. Separate problem. IIRC HBS studied this and basically the issue is we stopped enforcing our anti-competition laws a while back[1]. So we end up with a fraction of firms that each sector would financially support. Both because it creates giants that are much harder to compete against, and because it allows mergers between competing firms that AFAIK could be deemed illegal under existing laws. 1 - See, for example the Robinson-Patman Act, whose dormancy allows big box retailers to exist. This law has never been repealed.
      - Karrot_Kream 7mo ago
        When companies stay private longer, private capital stays tied up for longer, decreasing public liquidity and keeping bad private investments afloat for longer. Part of the creative destruction of the dot com bust was the legion of badly performing companies that went public and were thoroughly rejected by public investors, offering an exit to later investors and employees. Right now badly performing companies can limp along tying up liquidity and locking up employee equity only to head to an eventual bankruptcy or bad IPO.
jimmygrapes 7mo ago
https://www.acquisition.gov/gsam/552.216-75 https://www.acquisition.gov/gsam/552.216-75 I get where you're coming from but this is a rough transition for some. Ideally we would hope that more frequent reporting would necessitate development of more seamless systems... but we ain't there yet. There's a lot of flexibility in some systems but they allow that flexibility so that it can be tightened as needed. Be careful.
DANmode 7mo ago
…huh? What does any of this have to do with too-soon reports poorly representing positive trends that can’t be tracked in 1-3 month timelines?
sheepscreek 7mo ago
This sounds great on paper till you realize the amount of time and effort that goes into coordinating so many humans is significant. Also quarterly reporting and TLS certs are worlds apart. There are things like SOX compliance in public companies. It is a mandatory requirement that necessitates so much ceremony surrounding how information is captured and decisions signed off. Then for the execs themselves, it is at least a week of effort easy leading up to the quarterly result call. Prepping for the investor deck, QnAs, being open to more frequent regulator scrutiny. Doing this every month would have diminishing returns for everyone involved. Source: worked at public companies, helped executives prepare for said calls.
- deleted 7mo ago
  [deleted]
- etempleton 7mo ago
  I think it shifts the skillset of executives a little bit. At publicly traded companies the quarterly shareholder meetings and the preparation that goes into it becomes such an outsized portion of the job that being good at that one thing is highly valued. I don’t think moving quarterly to bi-annually changes that much besides making the CEO and CFOs and some other folks jobs a bit easier.
JumpCrisscross 7mo ago
> Release early, release often Release unrequired. This is the purpose of an 8-K. We don’t need every public firm to constantly release quarterly. These rules arose in 1970. Granting more flexibility, now, makes sense. (Post SOX, earnings require senior management.)
fnordpiglet 7mo ago
I up you to continuous reporting. Audit should be inherent to the system, not a process after the fact. As a public company all owners should have access to daily closed books, and all companies should be able to close their books daily in 2026. Every six months being the cadence we learn how our companies we own are doing is absurd. It leads to really long dark periods. Also for employees it means we can only divest in a semi annual window. Our carry risk is extensive and expanding. This is about hiding truth longer, which is the MO of this administration top to bottom.
- jandrewrogers 7mo ago
  That is an absurd cadence. It is extremely expensive to do this reporting; an an enormous amount of useless activity is slaved to providing it in companies that need to. This is literally a call for more bureaucracy theater. The obvious net effect is that companies would structure themselves to no longer have the reporting requirement, as the cost of reporting exceeds the benefits. That would not benefit society at large.
  - mixdup 7mo ago
    The reason quarters take so long to close is because the numbers are being fiddled with. There's no reason someone shouldn't be able to close a quarter and report the numbers with the automation we have today in technology, meaning without some magic AI/LLM, other than people are constantly trying to reclassify expenses or income in a way that saves the quarter Why, after 30-40 years of modern computing in accounting does it still take a month to close the books? I worked at a public company that was $100m revenue yearly and it took a whole month to close the books. Absolute insanity. Even AT&T or Verizon or GM should be able to report at least weekly.
    - jandrewrogers 7mo ago
      This is a naive view of what reporting entails and the difficulty of coalescing a report that meets the requirements of the audience the report is for. It isn't a numbers dump from a database, it requires substantial interpretation of things that the database does not and cannot contain. It isn't fiddling with the numbers, it is that the numbers can't contain things relevant to their representation for external parties as a legal matter. When I have been in positions where reporting was a necessary part of my job, reporting related activity probably consumed 1/3 of my time. Even in highly optimized contexts, it consumes a stupid amount of time and the impact on the consumers of those reports is often quite low. It is almost a total waste of time. There should be some reporting but the current cadence and requirements is way too high for many large companies. Reporting doesn't have infinite ROI.
jandrewrogers 7mo ago
Reporting is onerous as fuck. You end up with entire bureaucracies dedicated to the theater of reporting. The tighter the turnaround the dicier it becomes because certainty that anything you are reporting is true decreases, which increases liability. This is one of those ideas that sounds amazing to people have never operated a real business with reporting requirements. In practice it turns into a classic case of Goodhart's Law. It drives insane incentives. Reducing reporting intervals would seriously reduce overheads and inefficiency in business. This is 100% a good change.
clickety_clack 7mo ago
TLS certs are a single certificate. Corporate reporting is an aggregate of different types of numbers in disparate systems summed up through divisions that might as well be different companies. Although… if there was a software engineering union, swinging a mandate for live public financial reporting is the type of non productive work that would keep everyone in a job.

nickff 7mo 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 7mo ago
Longer periods between audited (aka "accurate") results will lead to compounding errors. Fewer people at the company will have a clear idea of how the company is doing. Audits are like CI for finances.
- nickff 7mo ago
  I agree that would be preferable if reporting were less expensive and (legally) risky, and what you're describing is definitely closer to the original intent of the rule (that of giving investors the information available to management), but it would make being a public company even more burdensome than it already is, and the number of public corporations is already in decline.
  - HeWhoLurksLate 7mo ago
    how much of that decline is due to mergers vs failing vs new private companies being formed instead?
  - runako 7mo ago
    > it would make being a public company even more burdensome than it already is Every company doesn't have to be public. The US taxpayer underwrites US securities markets, and companies that trade on our public markets have access to some of the deepest pools of low-cost liquidity in the world. But companies are obviously free to list elsewhere. > the number of public corporations is already in decline. Separate problem. IIRC HBS studied this and basically the issue is we stopped enforcing our anti-competition laws a while back[1]. So we end up with a fraction of firms that each sector would financially support. Both because it creates giants that are much harder to compete against, and because it allows mergers between competing firms that AFAIK could be deemed illegal under existing laws. 1 - See, for example the Robinson-Patman Act, whose dormancy allows big box retailers to exist. This law has never been repealed.
    - Karrot_Kream 7mo ago
      When companies stay private longer, private capital stays tied up for longer, decreasing public liquidity and keeping bad private investments afloat for longer. Part of the creative destruction of the dot com bust was the legion of badly performing companies that went public and were thoroughly rejected by public investors, offering an exit to later investors and employees. Right now badly performing companies can limp along tying up liquidity and locking up employee equity only to head to an eventual bankruptcy or bad IPO.

jimmygrapes 7mo ago

https://www.acquisition.gov/gsam/552.216-75 https://www.acquisition.gov/gsam/552.216-75 I get where you're coming from but this is a rough transition for some. Ideally we would hope that more frequent reporting would necessitate development of more seamless systems... but we ain't there yet. There's a lot of flexibility in some systems but they allow that flexibility so that it can be tightened as needed. Be careful.

DANmode 7mo ago

…huh? What does any of this have to do with too-soon reports poorly representing positive trends that can’t be tracked in 1-3 month timelines?

sheepscreek 7mo ago

This sounds great on paper till you realize the amount of time and effort that goes into coordinating so many humans is significant. Also quarterly reporting and TLS certs are worlds apart. There are things like SOX compliance in public companies. It is a mandatory requirement that necessitates so much ceremony surrounding how information is captured and decisions signed off. Then for the execs themselves, it is at least a week of effort easy leading up to the quarterly result call. Prepping for the investor deck, QnAs, being open to more frequent regulator scrutiny. Doing this every month would have diminishing returns for everyone involved. Source: worked at public companies, helped executives prepare for said calls.

deleted 7mo ago
[deleted]
etempleton 7mo ago
I think it shifts the skillset of executives a little bit. At publicly traded companies the quarterly shareholder meetings and the preparation that goes into it becomes such an outsized portion of the job that being good at that one thing is highly valued. I don’t think moving quarterly to bi-annually changes that much besides making the CEO and CFOs and some other folks jobs a bit easier.

JumpCrisscross 7mo ago

> Release early, release often Release unrequired. This is the purpose of an 8-K. We don’t need every public firm to constantly release quarterly. These rules arose in 1970. Granting more flexibility, now, makes sense. (Post SOX, earnings require senior management.)

fnordpiglet 7mo ago

I up you to continuous reporting. Audit should be inherent to the system, not a process after the fact. As a public company all owners should have access to daily closed books, and all companies should be able to close their books daily in 2026. Every six months being the cadence we learn how our companies we own are doing is absurd. It leads to really long dark periods. Also for employees it means we can only divest in a semi annual window. Our carry risk is extensive and expanding. This is about hiding truth longer, which is the MO of this administration top to bottom.

jandrewrogers 7mo ago
That is an absurd cadence. It is extremely expensive to do this reporting; an an enormous amount of useless activity is slaved to providing it in companies that need to. This is literally a call for more bureaucracy theater. The obvious net effect is that companies would structure themselves to no longer have the reporting requirement, as the cost of reporting exceeds the benefits. That would not benefit society at large.
- mixdup 7mo ago
  The reason quarters take so long to close is because the numbers are being fiddled with. There's no reason someone shouldn't be able to close a quarter and report the numbers with the automation we have today in technology, meaning without some magic AI/LLM, other than people are constantly trying to reclassify expenses or income in a way that saves the quarter Why, after 30-40 years of modern computing in accounting does it still take a month to close the books? I worked at a public company that was $100m revenue yearly and it took a whole month to close the books. Absolute insanity. Even AT&T or Verizon or GM should be able to report at least weekly.
  - jandrewrogers 7mo ago
    This is a naive view of what reporting entails and the difficulty of coalescing a report that meets the requirements of the audience the report is for. It isn't a numbers dump from a database, it requires substantial interpretation of things that the database does not and cannot contain. It isn't fiddling with the numbers, it is that the numbers can't contain things relevant to their representation for external parties as a legal matter. When I have been in positions where reporting was a necessary part of my job, reporting related activity probably consumed 1/3 of my time. Even in highly optimized contexts, it consumes a stupid amount of time and the impact on the consumers of those reports is often quite low. It is almost a total waste of time. There should be some reporting but the current cadence and requirements is way too high for many large companies. Reporting doesn't have infinite ROI.

jandrewrogers 7mo ago

Reporting is onerous as fuck. You end up with entire bureaucracies dedicated to the theater of reporting. The tighter the turnaround the dicier it becomes because certainty that anything you are reporting is true decreases, which increases liability. This is one of those ideas that sounds amazing to people have never operated a real business with reporting requirements. In practice it turns into a classic case of Goodhart's Law. It drives insane incentives. Reducing reporting intervals would seriously reduce overheads and inefficiency in business. This is 100% a good change.

clickety_clack 7mo ago

TLS certs are a single certificate. Corporate reporting is an aggregate of different types of numbers in disparate systems summed up through divisions that might as well be different companies. Although… if there was a software engineering union, swinging a mandate for live public financial reporting is the type of non productive work that would keep everyone in a job.