Quarterly Financial Reporting Is Needed, Productive, And Good by David Merkel, CFA, FSA, of The Aleph Blog. The following may be controversial. It also may be dull to the point that you might not care. Here’s why you should care: quarterly financial reporting is a useful and productive use of corporate resources, and it would be a shame to lose it because some people with a patina of intelligence think it is harmful. Who knows? Losing it might even make you poorer. The cause for tonight’s article is a piece from the Wall Street Journal, Time to End Quarterly Reports, Law Firm Says. Here’s the first two sentences: Influential law firm Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz has an idea that may be music to the ears of its big corporate clients and a nightmare for some investors and analysts: end quarterly earnings reports. Wachtell on Tuesday called on the Securities and Exchange Commission to consider allowing U.S. companies to do away with the obligatory updates, one of the most important rituals on Wall Street and in corporate America, suggesting that they distract executives from long-term goals. The basic case is that quarterly earnings lead companies to behave in a short-term manner, and underinvest for longer-term growth, thus hurting the US economy. I disagree. There are at least four things that are false in the arguments made in the article, and in books like Saving Capitalism from Short-Termism: Quarterly earnings don’t produce value in and of themselves Quarterly earnings cause most corporations to ignore the long-term. Ending quarterly earnings will end activism, buybacks, and dividends. Buybacks and dividends are bad uses of capital, and more capital investment, especially for long-dated projects, is necessarily a good thing. Why Quarterly Financial Reporting are Valuable I’ve written a number of articles about quarterly earnings and estimates of those earnings: Earnings Estimates as a Control Mechanism, Flawed as they are, and Earnings Estimates as a Control Mechanism, Flawed as they are, Redux. The basic idea is this: quarterly earnings results give investors an idea as to whether the companies remain on their long-term growth path or not. As I wrote: Most of the value of a Corporation on a going concern basis stems from the future earnings of the company. Investors want to have an estimate of forward earnings so that they can gauge whether the company is growing at an appropriate rate. Now, it wouldn’t matter if the system were set up by third-party sell side analysts, by buyside analysts, by companies themselves, or by a combination thereof. The thing is investors are forward-looking, and they want a forward-looking estimate to allow them to estimate whether the companies are doing well with their current earnings or not. Don’t think of... More