October 29, 2025
Responding to a call to action by President Donald Trump, Securities and Exchange Chair Paul Atkins is “fast-tracking” a proposal that would allow publicly traded US companies to file financial reports twice a year instead of quarterly. The proposed rule change has triggered opposition by some stakeholders.
If the rule is relaxed, it would end a practice that has undergirded the US investment framework for 55 years. Since 1970, US companies have been required to file unaudited “Form 10-Q” reports with the SEC to share certain information about their financial performance with shareholders, in addition to submitting audited annual Form 10-K reports.
The quarterly reporting requirement makes the US somewhat of a global outlier—to some, quarterly reporting is part of what makes US stock markets the gold standard for transparency; others consider it costly red tape that encourages short-termism.
President Trump falls squarely in the latter camp. During his first term in 2018, he urged the SEC to ditch quarterly reports, but the initiative stalled after the Commission issued a request for comment on the matter. On September 15, President Trump again pushed the idea in a social media post as a way for corporations to “save money” spent on compliance “and allow managers to focus on properly running their companies” instead of doing so “on a quarterly basis.”
This time, however, President Trump has an important ally in SEC Chair Atkins, who voiced immediate support and pledged to fast-track the rule in a September 29 Financial Times opinion piece.
“The government should provide the minimum effective dose of regulation needed to protect investors while allowing businesses to flourish,” Chair Akins wrote, saying he was “fast-tracking President Trump’s proposal to equip companies with the option to report on a semi-annual basis, rather than locking them into the current quarterly reporting regime.”
In the article, Chair Atkins praised President Trump for ending the “mission creep” by which the SEC had “drifted from the precedent and predictability that sustain … confidence” in capital markets and abandoned “its core mission of protecting investors, maintaining fair, orderly and efficient markets, and facilitating capital formation.”
Specifically, he blasted predecessors who he believes strayed from the “principle of materiality” to write rules “for shareholders who seek to effect social change or have motives unrelated to maximising the financial return on their investment.”
“It is time for the SEC to remove its thumb from the scales and allow the market to dictate the optimal reporting frequency based on factors such as the company’s industry, size and investor expectations,” Chair Atkins said. “Giving companies the option to report semi-annually is not a retreat from transparency.”
Chair Atkins noted that foreign companies listed on US exchanges are only required to file semiannual reports, as are companies in the European Union and the United Kingdom. Both imposed quarterly financials for a time before reverting to twice-yearly reports, the EU from 2004 to 2013 and the UK from 2007 to 2014. Most Canadian and Japanese companies, like those in the US, file quarterly financial reports, as do all companies in India and China, which is ironic, given President Trump’s assertion in his social media post that “China has a 50 to 100 year view on management of a company …”
Critics say less frequent reporting will hurt shareholders, especially retail investors, by widening the gap between publicly available information and facts known by company insiders. Unlike Chair Atkins, they say the move will undermine transparency by reducing the steady flow of reliable financial information to market participants.
In a 2020 research article in The Accounting Review, researchers studying thousands of US and European peer companies across multiple industries found that when US companies announced quarterly earnings, the European companies’ stock price more closely tracked their US counterparts when the European companies weren’t reporting.
The authors of article, “The Dark Side of Low Financial Reporting Frequency,” concluded that the “information vacuum” created by semiannual reporting caused investors to “periodically overreact to peer-firm earnings news in the absence of own-firm earnings disclosures in interim periods.” In addition, investors overcorrected when the European peer companies finally issued their semiannual earnings reports.
“We conclude[d] that less-transparent reporting causes more volatile and less efficient stock prices,” said Salman Arif, an associate professor at the University of Minnesota’s Carlson School of Management and one of the paper’s authors.
Some also take issue with the idea that semiannual reporting will motivate managers to make longer-term decisions. On September 19, columnist James Mackintosh of The Wall Street Journal argued that President Trump was “wrong in every possible way.” For one thing, six months isn’t the long term, he wrote. For another, US companies actually do invest for the long term despite quarterly reporting, he said, citing technology companies’ investment of “nearly $400 billion this year in long-term artificial intelligence projects.”
Furthermore, Mackintosh wrote, there was “no effect on investment or research spending for companies that switched to half-yearly reporting” in the UK since quarterly requirements were eliminated in 2014. “Indeed, if quarterly reporting were such a huge barrier to companies, it’s odd that the U.S. market is thriving, while London is struggling to attract new listings or even hold on to existing once,” he said.
Chair Atkins has said he would present a proposed rule for public comment late this year or in early 2026. SEC rule changes typically take more than a year go into effect, even when expedited, and there is no guarantee the new rule will be approved or what exact shape it will take. Given the strong opposition to less frequent reporting among academics, institutional investors, and shareholder advocates, the public comment period should yield a vigorous debate.