Barron’s Interviews Partner Darren Robbins About the Continuing Importance of Frequent Reporting

In the wake of a proposal for the Securities and Exchange Commission to no longer require quarterly earnings reports, Barron’s sat down with Robbins Geller Rudman & Dowd LLP partner Darren Robbins and other leading lawyers and experts to discuss how the change would affect companies and investors if implemented. The September proposal called for public companies to report their earnings in public SEC filings semiannually, instead of the current quarterly requirement.

Below are Robbins’s comments to Barron’s.

The Wrong Move for the AI Era

Darren Robbins is a founding partner of Robbins Geller Rudman & Dowd LLP.

The debate over whether public companies should report financial results quarterly or semiannually is hardly new. Back in 2019, the SEC explored shifting to semiannual reporting, but ultimately maintained quarterly reporting. For good reason, as investors prefer more transparency and information, not less. And in the AI era, in which innovation and risk are changing market dynamics at lightning speed, reducing transparency would be a step backward at exactly the wrong time.

Front-runners change spots quickly in the AI race. Last week’s winner is this week’s laggard. Just this month, OpenAI’s GPT 5.1 was received with a polite golf clap while Alphabet’s Gemini 3 provoked oohs and aahs with its surprisingly strong performance. Six months is an eternity these days. Just look at the difference between the market on “Liberation Day” in April, when stocks were plummeting, and the first week of October, when they hit successive record highs.

Risks to investors are also accumulating more rapidly. Hype seems to be in overdrive in the AI space, and some AI players are engaged in circular transactions. Investors need to know if there are viable, profitable businesses beneath all these transactions and glitzy product launches, especially as valuations continue to rise.

Public reporting is where the hype meets cold, hard reality. Introducing a six-month lag would only deepen investor suspicion and hinder the capital markets at a critical time. And if prior misleading statements are revealed in a semiannual reporting regime, we can expect to see sharper market reactions and steeper investor losses.

Investors clearly prefer more-frequent reporting. In a CFA Institute survey of institutional investors, 84% of respondents said that they rely on quarterly releases. More than 90% said such releases add valuable insight beyond press-release earnings. Another study found quarterly data improved analysts’ ability to forecast long-term earnings trends, increasing model accuracy by roughly 25%.

The best argument against quarterly reporting is that it forces managers to focus on short-term targets rather than long-term growth. In 30 years of prosecuting securities fraud for institutional investors, I can tell you that the curse of short-termism is real. What is certain, however, is that the cause isn’t frequent disclosure or excessive transparency. Rather, it is likely a combination of perverse incentives and suboptimal policies.

By all measures, a shift to semiannual reporting is a solution in search of a problem. In the AI era, where it is harder than ever to tell a winner from a fugazi, sunlight every quarter is pretty darn essential.

Reprinted with permission from Barron’s.

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