Comment by throw0101c
8 hours ago
This idea goes back several years, and Barry Ritholtz had thoughts on it back in 2015:
> Back to quarterly earnings. Why do we even require them in the first place? The answer is that thanks to the transparency provided by regularly reported earnings and profits, investors can make informed decisions about which stocks to own or avoid. Owners of public companies have hired managers to run the businesses for them, and they want to see with some consistency how healthy the companies that they own actually are. If there are issues with how the business is being managed by the hired corporate executives, the owners want to know sooner rather than later -- and to have a chance to make course corrections. Quarterly numbers allow that to happen.
* https://web.archive.org/web/20151008083649/http://www.bloomb...
* Via: https://ritholtz.com/2015/08/worst-idea-ever/
And in 2018 he suggested going in the opposite direction—more frequent—to even daily reporting:
> 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.
> This is counterproductive.
> My proposal: Report earnings monthly, with the goal of eventually moving to a near real-time, daily, fundamental update. Technology is improving to the point where business intelligence software and big data analyses will make this automated. Indeed, some companies already do much of this internally.
> Once financial reporting becomes daily, the short-term earnings obsession will all but disappear. In its place will be a focus on broader profit trends and deeper analytics.
[…]
> The bottom line is so obvious: To make quarterly earnings less important, we should be exploring ways to report results more often, not less.
* https://www.fa-mag.com/news/reporting-profits-daily-would-en...
Exactly! Continuous reporting reduces the stupid gaming of quarterly results. Weekly would be best as anything longer still gives sales teams enough time to rig the game as they do currently. I'd also get rid of fixed year ends for tax purposes and replace them with continuous trailing 12-month assessments.
Imo, this makes much more sense...
But this is Trump's SEC.. so expect backwards progress like with everything else.
Would this benefit the big companies lobbying? No? Well, then it makes negative sense.
I have worked in an industry (QSR) where it is commonplace that damn near the entire company is copied on a DAILY email of system-wide sales reports, and let me tell you you, it was NOT A GOOD THING.
I assume you mean that employees had daily goals? This is both not unusual and unrelated to investor reporting requirements.
No, I mean I as a relatively junior employee literally got a daily email with nationwide same store sales (dollar amounts , aggregated region, and corporate, franchise, etc) vs prior day, week, month, year and if it was ever down on even day 1 or 2 of a promo like “LTO spicy chicken funbox” or whatever you can guarantee the CEO would be calling and trying to upend and reverse the 3+ months of work you put into that product, campaign, etc because a single day of sales was down. No matter if it might have been down because of a cold front or literal noise in the data rather than a bad product. Everyone’s head was on a swivel and I can’t think of many more stressful environments
I personally witnessed this, at more than one of the top 5 qsr chains
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And yet, some very, very good public company CEOs like Buffet have carved out worlds where they report thinly and publicly claim they do not manage to quarterly earnings.