The SEC Wants to End Quarterly Reporting Theater. Honestly, It’s About Time

Last week, the SEC proposed allowing public companies to shift from mandatory quarterly reporting to semiannual reporting, giving companies the option to file one interim report instead of three Form 10-Qs each year. Companies could still voluntarily provide quarterly updates through earnings releases, but the proposal fundamentally challenges one of the core assumptions modern Wall Street operates on: that businesses should constantly manage themselves on 90-day cycles.

Frankly, I think this is one of the smartest ideas regulators have floated in years.

Not because transparency is bad. Public markets absolutely need accountability, but there’s a massive difference between accountability and forcing companies to organize their entire operational cadence around quarterly sentiment management.

Over time, quarterly reporting’s become akin to performance theater. Executives now spend enormous amounts of time shaping narratives, massaging guidance language, preparing defensive talking points, and managing analyst expectations instead of focusing exclusively on building durable businesses.

Wall Street Confuses Headlines With Strategy

One of the stupidest patterns in media is watching a company’s stock get punished because another company announced something vaguely adjacent to its business. Roku has fallen victim to this multiple times. Somewhere along the way, Wall Street stopped evaluating businesses and started live-reacting to headlines like a day trader with an Adderall prescription and an X.com account.

Anyone who’s operated inside this industry for more than five minutes knows how fucking absurd this can get.

The “experts” on Wall Street often react to product announcements the way Labradoodles react to tennis balls. Something shiny gets thrown across the room and suddenly every stock in the sector sprints into traffic.

A product announcement is not distribution. A feature isn’t a business model. A press release isn’t consumer behavior. And investor excitement isn’t enterprise value.

But public companies increasingly behave as though every headline requires an immediate strategic response because markets reward narrative momentum faster than they reward operational discipline. That creates terrible incentives inside organizations, especially in industries like media where meaningful advantages are usually built over years, not quarters.

Quarterly Earnings Turn Companies Into Short-Term Addicts

The biggest issue with quarterly reporting isn’t the reporting itself. It’s the organizational behavior that forms around it.

Companies slowly start building for the quarter instead of building for the customer.

Product roadmaps become shaped by what analysts want to hear on earnings calls rather than what users actually value long term. Teams start prioritizing temporary engagement spikes because they create cleaner quarterly narratives. Executives become more focused on reducing short-term stock volatility than making difficult strategic investments that may take years to compound.

That’s how you end up with bloated product experiences, reactive M&A strategies, rushed feature launches, and endless adjacency plays designed more to satiate investor expectations than strengthen the actual business.

Quarterly earnings culture is basically the business version of crash dieting. You can make the numbers look better fast, but eventually the underlying organism starts eating itself.

And the irony is that many of the best strategic decisions in modern media and technology initially look terrible to Wall Street. Netflix’s password-sharing crackdown looked like a customer backlash machine before it became a growth lever. Disney’s streaming investment looked reckless while the losses were visible and the strategic control was still being built. Meta’s AI spending triggered a market-cap wipeout because investors saw expense before they saw advantage. Public markets react to the cost of the move before they understand the strategic cost of not making it.

Building infrastructure is fucking expensive. So is owning your own technology stack. So is investing in advertising systems, live production capabilities, creator ecosystems, and global distribution.

The problem is that Wall Street often punishes companies long before the strategic payoff from those investments actually shows up.

Which, historically speaking, has created some pretty interesting opportunities for people capable of thinking longer than 90 days (wink.)

Most meaningful competitive advantages look inefficient in the beginning and that’s the point. If they looked immediately profitable and obvious, we’d all be building them.

But once those systems mature, they become incredibly difficult to replicate.

The market routinely misprices this dynamic because markets tend to overvalue visible momentum and undervalue operational positioning that compounds quietly over time.

Streaming Became a Casualty of the 90-Day Economy

For years, media companies organized themselves around investor narratives instead of honest strategic differentiation. Everyone wanted to position themselves as “the next Netflix,”because the market rewarded subscriber growth above almost everything else. Then the entire industry became trapped in the subscriber wars, where quarterly net adds became the dominant measure of success regardless of whether those subscribers were profitable, durable, or strategically valuable.

That pressure distorted nearly every major decision across the business.

Content spending escalated beyond sustainable levels because companies needed acquisition spikes. International expansion accelerated before many services had mature monetization systems in place. Licensing strategies became reactive. Bundling strategies changed constantly. Entire release cadences got manipulated around churn management and quarterly optics.

Some companies spent billions manufacturing growth curves that were never structurally sustainable because the market had decided growth velocity mattered more than business quality.

Now the industry is spending years unwinding those decisions.

At the same time, many of the strongest long-term strategic moves in streaming weren’t initially rewarded by Wall Street at all. Building ad infrastructure wasn’t considered exciting. Owning first-party viewing data didn’t generate headlines. Investing in operating systems looked boring. Developing direct production capabilities for live sports seemed operationally expensive before leagues and distributors realized how strategically important those systems would become.

The companies that spent years quietly building infrastructure, distribution, advertising systems, and platform-level capabilities often ended up in much stronger strategic positions than the companies optimizing primarily for quarterly momentum.

That’s the part Wall Street consistently struggles to price correctly. Most durable advantages look expensive, inefficient, or outright irrational before they start compounding.

Earnings Calls Have Become Reality TV for Finance Bros

We love the phrase “content is king,” right?

Quarterly reporting has partially transformed corporate management into content production.

Earnings calls now function like media events. Financial TV covers quarterly guidance revisions the way ESPN covers trade deadlines. Analysts dissect sentence wording changes like they’re decoding military intelligence. Social media has amplified all of it into a nonstop volatility machine where entire sectors can swing because someone clipped a six-second soundbite from an earnings call and attached a fire emoji to it.

That’s not capital formation anymore. That’s volatility entertainment masquerading as financial analysis.

And unfortunately, public companies have adapted to that environment by optimizing communication strategy as aggressively as business strategy itself.

The SEC proposal doesn’t eliminate any of this entirely, but it potentially creates more breathing room between those cycles.

Great Companies Usually Look Wrong Before They Look Obvious

Real strategy requires patience. It requires sequencing. It requires trade-offs. It requires periods where investments look inefficient before they become foundational.

Most meaningful product or infrastructure advantages don’t emerge inside a single quarter. Sometimes they look actively irrational for years before the economics compound into something undeniable.

The companies that usually win long term are the ones disciplined enough to absorb temporary criticism while building systems competitors can’t easily replicate later.

But public markets increasingly create the opposite incentive structure. Optimize optics first. Accelerate narratives. Announce constantly. Defend the stock price. Explain strategy later.

That’s some backwards shit.

Wall Street should reward great execution after it becomes visible in the business. It shouldn’t dictate the roadmap itself.

I don’t think semiannual reporting suddenly fixes Wall Street. Financial media will still overreact. Activists will still exist. Traders will still chase momentum. Public companies will still face enormous pressure to produce predictable growth narratives.

But reducing the frequency of mandatory quarterly theater could give companies more room to operate strategically instead of emotionally.

This business increasingly depends on long-cycle investments in infrastructure, advertising systems, data architecture, live production capabilities, global distribution, IP ownership, and creator ecosystems. Those advantages take years to mature correctly.

You can’t build enduring businesses if every roadmap decision gets filtered through “what happens to the stock next quarter?”

Some of the most valuable strategic decisions in media history looked inefficient, expensive, or outright stupid in the short term because markets are often terrible at distinguishing signal from noise in real time.

The Streaming Wars Take

The companies that build durable businesses are usually the ones focused on customers, operational leverage, and long-term positioning first, then letting Wall Street catch up later.

That’s how it should work.