The stock exchange that asked the SEC for quarterly reporting changes

A lot of petitions to the government are met with…radio silence. And that’s the gentle way of putting it.

But that wasn’t the case for a September 2025 petition filed to the Securities and Exchange Commission by the Long-Term Stock Exchange, requesting an amendment to quarterly reporting requirements. Maybe you’ve heard: The SEC is reportedly considering it.

Right place, right time? There’s a bit of that, but to hear Bill Harts, the Long-Term Stock Exchange’s CEO, tell it, as he did at the Wall Street Journal’s March 23–24 CFO Council Summit in Palo Alto, California, it was also a matter of listening to the right voices.

Tech entrepreneur Eric Ries founded The Long-Term Stock Exchange, or LTSE, in 2016 with the goal of reversing “the epidemic of short-term thinking” at many corporations, Ries told CNBC in 2023. “The incentives that we’ve created around finance, around the capital market, really make it difficult for companies to do the right thing.”

The petition. LTSE gained approval from the SEC in 2019, per CNBC, and started trading in September 2020. Listed companies must outline principles evidencing their long-term commitments, like environmental improvements. To date, just three companies are listed with the LTSE (all also listed on a major exchange): Asana, ThredUp, and Bladex. But those three companies have a unique vantage point on the reporting process, given their long-term focus.

“One of the things that we hear a lot from our listed companies, and companies we talk to, is that the cost of reporting…and [taking] focus away from your business, [and putting] it onto reporting is extremely onerous,” Harts said. “And it’s reflected sometimes in the fact that smaller companies shy away from going public, and they say, ‘Why do I need all this extra overhead? This extra burden?’”

That feedback was why the LTSE filed its petition to the SEC last September, “asking them to change the reporting frequency from quarterly to six months, but to make it optional,” Harts said. “If a company wants to continue reporting quarterly, of course they can.”

“As a requirement, we thought that six months is plenty of time,” Harts said. “What it will do is it’ll free up CFOs and company management [teams] to really focus more on their long-term plans and operating their business.”

For all the talk of long-term thinking, things actually moved pretty quickly from there. Harts said he was surprised by the speed with which the SEC moved to make quarterly reporting changes, adding that LTSE hadn’t been in private conversations with SEC Chair Paul Atkins ahead of the petition.

“After we filed this petition, there was a [Wall Street] Journal story, and then the next thing we knew, Paul Atkins, the chairman of the SEC, was saying, ‘We think this is a good idea,’” Harts said.

What’s next. The rapid timeline might continue, Harts said.

“We’ve had some conversations with the SEC recently where they haven’t really said when, but it was clear to us that they’re really thinking seriously about putting out what’s known as a concept release or rule proposal,” which he said could help address the many questions to arise around implementation.

“For instance, who gets to decide if a company is going to report quarterly or semiannually? And how does that work?” Harts said. “Does a company have to apply to corporate finance at the SEC, or can they just do it unilaterally?”

“I think what you’re going to see in the very near future is something from the SEC asking for comment about all these sort of extra issues that go around the actual proposal,” he continued.

Still, that timeline could be short, too. “I think the comment period on this will be somewhere between 30 and 90 days,” Hart said. Hey, some long-term plans move fast.