Investors worry companies will drop quarterly disclosures

So, what do investors have to say about all this? “This,” of course, being the Securities and Exchange Commission’s proposed rule change to allow public companies to file semiannually. Obviously.

We’ve got a glimpse, thanks to a survey from the CFA Institute, a nonprofit organization that provides financial education to investment professionals.

Completed before the SEC released its proposed rule on semiannual reporting, the 46-question survey received more than 2,500 responses from investment analysts and portfolio managers in January 2026.

The survey revealed deep investor opposition to semiannual reporting. More than six in 10 (62%) respondents opposed replacing quarterly reporting with semiannual, while 70% opposed “granting issuers broad flexibility to choose or change their own reporting frequency.”

Comparability concerns loomed particularly large: 82% of respondents voiced concern about comparability across companies and industries if different reporting cadences were implemented.

“Respondents generally expect that many companies would discontinue quarterly reporting if it became optional and that quarterly disclosures would become materially less informative and less comparable,” the report noted. Only 32% of respondents expected US public companies to continue reporting quarterly should it become optional.

Meanwhile, just 21% said they expected public companies to continue filing 10-Qs in a voluntary quarterly reporting regime, while 78% said they didn’t think 10-Qs should be abandoned.

“The survey results provide a clear and consistent message: Investors globally—not just in the US—continue to view quarterly reporting as an essential feature of transparent, efficient, and trustworthy capital markets,” Matthew Winters, a CFA and CPA who’s senior director of financial reporting policy advocacy at the CFA Institute, said in a release tied to the report.

But…we kind of knew investors deeply valued quarterly reporting already. Securities experts have argued that investor expectations will likely keep the semiannual proposal from vastly upending the corporate world.

“There will be companies who opt into it, but I don’t think that huge companies will necessarily embrace it because they have investors who expect quarterly reports and are set up to do quarterly evaluations,” Lisa Bragança, a former SEC branch chief who leads a securities defense law firm, told CFO Brew in May. “It may be a process over time that, once adopting this, more firms will transition into it, but I don’t think it’s going to be a deluge right away.”

The CFA Institute’s report is a “pre-production draft,” according to its authors, who note that while some editorial changes may occur in the final draft, “the substantive content of [the] report is complete.” They’re releasing it now “to inform the debate over semiannual versus quarterly reporting in a timely manner.”