THE SEC JUST BETRAYED EVERY RETAIL INVESTOR IN AMERICA

They formally proposed ELIMINATING mandatory quarterly reporting. Companies would file 2x a year instead of 4.

Trump championed it and SEC Chair Atkins fast-tracked it. The Republican majority on the commission means it will almost certainly pass.

The stated reason: quarterly reporting creates "short-term thinking."

But the REAL beneficiaries are CEOs who don't want investors asking questions every 90 days.

This isn't a new idea either.

Trump mentioned it during his first term in 2018 and the SEC studied it. But their own economists concluded that quarterly reporting increases transparency and reduces the cost of capital for companies raising funds.

They ignored it because the evidence said it was a BAD idea.

Now it's back. And this time the votes are there to push it through.

The argument that quarterly reporting encourages short-termism sounds reasonable until you really think about it:

Jamie Dimon and Warren Buffett wrote a joint op-ed in 2018 calling for the end of quarterly guidance. But guidance and mandatory disclosure are two completely different things. You can stop giving guidance tomorrow - nobody's stopping you.

What this proposal does is let companies stop SHOWING YOU THE NUMBERS.

Think about what that means in practice.

Right now if a company's margins are collapsing or cash is hemorrhaging or debt is quietly ballooning, you find out within 90 days. Under this proposal you might not see those numbers for half a year.

That's 6 months where insiders know the business is deteriorating and you don't. 6 months where management can keep selling you a story while the fundamentals rot underneath it.

America's capital markets became the envy of the world BECAUSE of disclosure requirements, not in spite of them. The quarterly reporting mandate has been in place since the 1970s. Every major economy that weakened its disclosure regime saw transparency deteriorate.

When the European Commission dropped quarterly reporting requirements in 2013, research found that information asymmetry between insiders and outside investors widened almost immediately.

Now ask yourself:

Who benefits from cutting financial disclosure in half?

Not retail investors who already have less information than the institutions trading against them.

Not analysts trying to hold management teams accountable.

The beneficiaries are executives who would rather go 6 months without an earnings call than answer uncomfortable questions about where the money is going. Companies where the gap between the story and the numbers gets wider every quarter. Companies where the CEO's compensation is tied to stock prices that require narratives nobody is allowed to question.

In 45 years on Wall Street I've learned ONE thing about transparency:

Companies that want you to see less are ALWAYS the ones you need to watch most closely.

The SEC is proposing to give them exactly what they want. In the most leveraged, most narrative-driven, most accountability-free market since 1999.

THIS NEEDS TO STOP