Back in 2018, during his first term as president, Donald Trump called for a curb on a federal requirement that publicly traded firms report their performance every three months. The idea is to nudge both investors and corporations toward longer-term perspectives and focus less on a fluctuating stock price. This week, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) unveiled a plan that will allow such companies to provide reports every six months.
In the intervening eight years, ever-faster algorithms have enabled warp-speed stock trading, inflating shareholder impatience and expectations of instantaneous information and returns. In 2021, a Cornell University study confirmed that “firms were actually becoming more short-term oriented across the market” – a trend linked to the growing demand for more data and short-term projections for the investing public and markets.
The relative flexibility offered by this rule change will likely save time and repeated effort for the managers and accountants who put together the SEC-mandated reports. Beyond that, the change is a small but key step that can support sustained investment choices and also encourage privately held companies to consider going public.
“More companies are choosing to remain private or returning to private ownership, rather than face mounting regulatory burdens and costs associated with being publicly traded,” according to a 2025 report issued by Nasdaq. The document noted a 36% decline in the number of publicly listed companies since 2000 – while firms funded with private capital grew by 475% in the same period.
Public capital markets have been described as an engine of economic growth – and their expansion widens opportunities for ordinary Americans to obtain a stake in the country’s economic success, through retirement plans and other investments.
Business titans such as Warren Buffett and JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon have long advocated for patient, value-focused investment and growth approaches that benefit both business and society more generally. The practice of quarterly projections, they warned in The Wall Street Journal in 2018, “leads to an unhealthy focus on short-term profits at the expense of long-term strategy, growth and sustainability.”
Such short-termism undermines investment in research and development, new equipment or technology, and staff upskilling. These are inputs that spur both innovation and productivity, even if they do not generate immediate shareholder returns.
“Building resilience to the risks of tomorrow … requires time spent learning, thinking and strategizing,” as the Kenan Institute for Private Enterprise at the University of North Carolina has noted.
And those processes require America’s corporate decision-makers and shareholding public to pursue a measured approach to wealth building that values broad societal benefits over mere stock market speculation.
