SEC Chair Atkins Turbocharges Trump’s Plan to Eliminate Quarterly Reports

Wall Street braces for seismic shift as regulatory gears grind into overdrive

The Acceleration Agenda

SEC leadership hits the gas on Trump's controversial proposal to scrap quarterly financial disclosures. Atkins' fast-track approach signals regulatory winds shifting toward long-term thinking—or just less frequent bad news for underperforming executives.

Market Implications

Traders reposition as reduced transparency becomes the new compliance frontier. Public companies could soon operate with six-month blindspots between reports—plenty of time for fortunes to change and scandals to brew unnoticed.

Investor Reactions

Institutional money managers scramble to adjust valuation models while retail investors face extended periods flying blind. Because who needs timely information when you can have quarterly surprises?

Regulatory Roulette

The move sparks fresh debate about whether reduced reporting actually encourages strategic planning or simply enables creative accounting. Because nothing says 'long-term vision' like making financial opacity official policy.

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Atkins is a fan of allowing the market to determine the ideal reporting frequency for each company. He believes that a company’s industry, its size, and the expectations of investors, and not the SEC’s unbending rules, should direct the rate at which it reports. In contrast with his predecessor, Gary Gensler, Atkins WOULD like to have the government provide “the minimum effective dose of regulation needed to protect investors while allowing businesses to flourish.”

Bolstering his argument, Atkins wrote that even though quarterly reporting was established in 1970, select companies still have the flexibility to use a different timetable. Furthermore, since the UK instituted semi-annual reporting in 2014, some UK-traded companies have still chosen to report quarterly.

While some investor advocacy groups have expressed concern that semi-annual reporting would diminish transparency, Atkins argues that the MOVE would instead renew the focus on companies’ and investors’ interests.

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