Less Dumb Investing

A push for less transparency in America’s capital markets is starting to gain traction.

President Trump recently revived his old idea of ending the requirement for public companies to report financial results every quarter. Instead, he suggested that reporting every six months should be enough. The proposal didn’t go anywhere during his first term, and it’s not clear it will now—but it’s still worth examining.

The reality is, investors aren’t the ones asking for this change. For them, less frequent disclosures mean less access to information and more risk. Timely, standardized financial reporting exists for a reason: it lowers a company’s cost of capital. The more transparent and reliable a company’s reporting, the cheaper it is to borrow or raise equity. Delayed reporting flips that logic on its head. Nobody wants to wait months to discover that a profitable business has slipped into the red.

Historically, U.S. companies have enjoyed some of the lowest costs of capital in the world—thanks, in part, to consistent reporting standards. Scaling that back would likely increase volatility. With fewer updates, every reporting period would carry more weight, leading to sharper price moves when results finally drop.

Meanwhile, the information gap wouldn’t disappear. Insiders would still have it, and large institutional investors with deep research budgets would still find ways to get an edge. Individual investors—the ones who benefit most from timely disclosures—would be left further behind.

The argument for longer reporting cycles also runs counter to how business operates today. The pace of change is accelerating, not slowing. Take artificial intelligence: three years ago it was barely on the radar for most investors. Today it’s reshaping industries at breakneck speed. Waiting six months between financial reports in an environment like this feels like an eternity.

Of course, none of this is about companies providing quarterly forecasts. That’s a different debate. The issue here is about transparency itself. Cutting back reporting doesn’t strengthen markets—it weakens them.

If the SEC were to adopt this change, some companies would still choose to report quarterly, if only to maintain credibility with investors. Competitors would then face a choice: follow suit or risk being punished for opacity.

There’s also the broader question of regulatory whiplash. Financial reporting requirements have swung back and forth over the years—tightened after scandals like Enron and WorldCom, loosened later for smaller firms, expanded into areas like ESG disclosures, and then scaled back again under pressure from business leaders. If quarterly reporting is dropped now, there’s every chance a future SEC would reinstate it, creating exactly the kind of uncertainty markets dislike most.

At the end of the day, capital markets function best when investors know where companies stand in real time. Less reporting doesn’t make businesses stronger or markets more efficient—it just makes everyone fly a little more blind.