Are quarterly earnings report necessary? Maybe not

Published August 20, 2018 This content is archived.

An article on Yahoo! News about a tweet on Friday by President Donald Trump asking the Securities and Exchange Commission to look into moving quarterly reporting for publicly traded companies to a six-month schedule reports a paper co-authored by Feng Gu, associate professor and chair of accounting and law in the UB School of Management, argues that earnings have lost most of their relevance to investors. “[A] devil’s advocate might argue that although the perfect earnings prediction gains have declined sharply over the past 30 years, the current 2 percent three-month return is not exactly chump change. True. But to obtain such gains, you do not need any intricate machinery to perfectly predict consensus beats and misses,” they write.