Trump Wants to Scrap Quarterly Earnings — Here’s the Fight He Just Picked

President Donald Trump is reviving an old gripe with Wall Street’s calendar: he wants public companies to stop reporting results every three months and switch to a six-month schedule.

In a Truth Social post, Trump said ditching quarterly updates would “save money, and allow managers to focus on properly running their companies.” The catch: the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has required quarterly reporting since 1970, so any change would need the regulator’s sign-off. He asked the SEC to study this in his first term; nothing changed.

Backers say the quarterly grind is costly, keeps companies private longer, and fuels “quarterly capitalism” — executives chasing short-term targets instead of building for the long haul. That view has fans in high places: Warren Buffett and JPMorgan’s Jamie Dimon have both argued against the obsession with near-term numbers (they opposed quarterly guidance, but the critique is similar).

The Long-Term Stock Exchange is preparing a petition urging the SEC to allow semiannual earnings with optional quarterly updates, saying fewer mandated check-ins would help companies focus on sustainable growth instead of “quarterly noise.”

Quarterly reports are the market’s heartbeat. They flag risks early and give timely reads on everything from airline demand to bank credit losses to Big Tech’s AI spending. Many investors say more frequent disclosures mean more transparency and fewer nasty surprises.

That was the point of moving to quarterly in the first place. As George Mason accounting professor David S. Koo notes, the SEC’s 1970 shift followed a boom-and-bust period when firms could hide deteriorating results between infrequent reports. Quarterly filings were meant to reduce that information gap.

What happens next

• Process: The SEC would have to propose and vote on a rule change; it doesn’t require Congress.
• Precedent: The UK and EU dropped mandatory quarterly reporting years ago; Hong Kong uses semiannual, while mainland-listed Chinese companies still file quarterly.
• Debate to watch: Expect fresh arguments about costs vs. transparency — and whether changing the cadence actually fixes short-termism, or if that’s really about incentives and governance.

Trump’s six-month plan taps into real frustration with short-term pressures. But for investors who live on data, halving the frequency of earnings could feel less like streamlining and more like flying with fewer instruments.

AP, CNN, CNBC, the New York Times, the Financial Times, and Axios contributed to this report.