“I buy on the assumption that they could close the market the next day and not reopen it for five years.”
Warren Buffett
Yes, investors and companies should look beyond quarterly earnings noise and focus on longer term delivery. But that doesn’t make quarterly reporting redundant.
When President Trump floated the idea of scrapping quarterly results, I was reminded of Poland in the 1990s.
The Warsaw Stock Exchange re-opened in 1991 with just five listed stocks. With mass privatisation came an avalanche of IPOs, making transparency essential.
The solution? Companies were required to file monthly financials and management updates. Analysts hunched over fax machines, scanning for the all-important “zysk netto” (net profit) line as the pages churned out.
The logic was simple: more transparency = better markets. Don’t need the data? Ignore it.
In Poland’s case, a rush of new companies to the stock market, in a rapidly transitioning economy meant timely information helped everyone make smarter decisions.
By 2009, with nearly 400 listed companies, a maturing economy and corporate sector, the monthly ritual was retired. Poland had firmly established itself as the region’s leading equity market.
The US isn’t Poland in the 1990s, of course. But the principle holds:
✅ Regular reporting helps investors track shifts in companies, industries and the wider economy in a timely manner; provides transparency on progress towards long-term targets; and keeps management accountable and shareholder focused.
✅ It reduces information asymmetry, levelling the field for smaller investors, who may lack the access to management, research and industry data that institutions enjoy.
✅ It gives shareholders, lenders, suppliers and policymakers the chance to react to tremors before they become earthquakes and allows encourages valuable feedback to management teams.
Quarterly reporting won’t prevent bubbles. But when volatility strikes and the cycle turns, having timely information matters.
In the US, quarterly reporting has been the rule since 1970. In Europe, it’s patchier: about half of Stoxx 600 companies report semi-annually. In the UK, the quarterly requirement was dropped in 2014 and semi-annual reporting is now the norm – yet investment didn’t rise, research spending didn’t jump, and the market has since struggled to attract new listings. US equities have comfortably outperformed both Europe and the UK.
What do you think? Time to scrap quarterly reporting, or is transparency too valuable to lose?