SEC to advance Trump pitch for fewer corporate earnings reports

Securities and Exchange Commission chair Paul Atkins said on Friday that financial regulators will move ahead with President Donald Trump’s proposal to shift mandatory earnings reports from a quarterly schedule onto a semiannual one.

Atkins described it as a “good way forward” that merited further consideration in a CNBC interview . He added he’d spoken to Trump about the idea, which the president first pushed for on Monday.

Still, the SEC chief signaled that business executives and investors will have the final word on the schedule of issuing their earnings reports.

“I think that for the sake of shareholders and public companies, the market can decide what the proper cadence is,” Atkins told CNBC.

Trump revived a push to switch earnings reports onto a semi-annual schedule earlier this week, saying on social media  that U.S. companies “should no longer be forced” to report every three months.

“This will save money, and allow managers to focus on properly running their companies,” he said.

Companies have been obligated to publish quarterly earnings reports for a little over a half-century. Those allow investors to sift through a firm’s financial health, the risks it faces, and whether it is capable of meeting their bottom lines. In recent months, many businesses such as AI chipmaker Nvidia have listed Trump’s tariffs as a sizable risk to their profit margins.

During Trump’s first term, the SEC studied the concept of establishing a twice-a-year schedule but it never got off the ground. In 2018, JP Morgan Chief Executive Jamie Dimon and billionaire investor Warren Buffett endorsed it in a Wall Street Journal op-ed .

The pair argued quarterly earnings “often leads to an unhealthy focus on short-term profits at the expense of long-term strategy, growth and sustainability.”

So far in Trump’s second term, the SEC is taking steps to ease up on financial regulation. The regulatory agency on Wednesday punted on finalizing a new disclosure deadline, delivering a win to hedge funds who won’t have to comply with fresh reporting requirements for at least another year.