alt Hacker NewsI rarely agree with Trump, but I'm a former exec at a public company and he's not wrong. You need a horde of lawyers and accountants and investor relations and SOX compliance people and auditors etc for the earnings reports. SOX adds burdensome processes at every layer of the organization. Your CFO and CEO will be preoccupied by earnings. It's a real disincentive for a small/medium cap company to go (or stay) public. A PE firm taking a company private can get rid of all this overhead on Day 1.
Not to mention, quarterly reports incentivize a company to focus on the current quarter instead of longer-term sustainability. Reporting twice a year doesn't solve all the above problems, but it sure would reduce them a little.
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Twice a year reporting also makes it easier for insiders to cash out before bad news becomes public.
Worth noting, though, that the SOX "burden" came out of Enron and WorldCom. I'd be willing to debate the actual mechanics of the burden and see if streamlining the regulations for modern companies is possible, but I won't accept that the burden is unjustified.