Public companies have reported their financial results every three months for over half a century. A new SEC proposal would let them go dark for six months at a time. While the executives, lawyers, and big institutional investors still know exactly how the business is doing, you'd be the last to find out.
A lot can go wrong in half a year. Failed product launches, ballooning debt, lawsuits, vanishing customers. Today the law forces companies to surface that information every quarter. Under the new rule, they can sit on it for six months at a stretch — plenty of time for insiders to quietly sell their shares to you (or your ETF) before the bad news tanks the stock.
Enron. WorldCom. Wirecard. The run-up to 2008. Every major modern accounting scandal was enabled by gaps and opacity in financial disclosure. Quarterly filings don't prevent fraud, but they dramatically shorten the window in which it can fester before someone outside the company can see it. What if Enron only had to cook their books twice a year?
Executives don't wait for filings — they watch the numbers in real time. Quarterly reports force that information into the open on a schedule. Stretch the schedule and you create a long "dark period" where the people on the inside have a confirmed advantage over everyone trading on the public side of the market.
The framing is voluntary, but the dynamics aren't. Once large companies start filing twice a year, smaller competitors face pressure to follow — they can't justify "more compliance than the bigger guy." Investor expectations adjust downward. What started as a choice quietly becomes the new normal. Almost no rule like this stays optional for long.
Companies still have to keep their books. They still have to brief their boards. The actual savings from skipping a public filing are modest legal and accounting fees — and those savings flow to the company and its executives. The cost of worse information falls on you, the person whose 401(k), IRA, or college fund holds the stock. That's a bad trade for ordinary investors even if it's a fine trade for corporate insiders.
You'll go directly to the official comment page for proposal S7-2026-15 on sec.gov. No login. No account. No hoops.
A few honest sentences from a real investor carry more weight than a copy-pasted form letter. Tell them you oppose the proposal and why it matters to you.
Your comment becomes part of the official record. The SEC is legally required to consider it before finalizing any rule.
That's the SEC's main argument for the change — but the evidence doesn't really support it. The UK and EU studied the move to semiannual reporting and found no meaningful improvement in long-term investment behavior. They did find more stock-price volatility and overreaction when reports finally arrived. Singapore tried it and is now reversing course because disclosure quality and trading volume both dropped. "Short-termism" is really about how CEOs are paid and how boards measure success — not how often companies file paperwork. Hiding the data doesn't fix the underlying problem; it just hides the consequences.
That's the SEC's argument. But the actual compliance savings are modest, and the cost — worse information flowing to ordinary investors — is borne by the people the SEC is supposed to protect. There are also other ways to reduce reporting burden that don't degrade transparency for retail investors.
Yes. Federal agencies like the SEC are legally required to consider comments from the public, and courts have overturned final rules when agencies failed to engage with substantive comments. Comments from real individual investors — describing real impact on real retirement accounts — directly answer the SEC's statutory mandate to protect "the investing public."
No. Plain-English comments from ordinary investors are exactly what the SEC needs to hear. You don't need to cite securities law. Saying something like "I'm a retail investor and I rely on quarterly reports to make decisions about my retirement savings" is genuinely valuable on the record.
Write in your own words — that matters more than any specific argument. A few angles that work: (1) you rely on quarterly information to make decisions, (2) longer gaps create an unfair advantage for corporate insiders, (3) "optional" doesn't fix the problem because companies that opt in are often the ones whose investors most need frequent updates, (4) the savings to companies aren't worth the cost to you.
Right now, on this rule, individual investors have an actual seat at the table. Take it.
Submit Your Comment to the SEC →