Help me understand what you are saying here. For those that don't know this one is "a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure".

I'm not advocating for a single metric that can be gamed. A business is fundamentally about dollars in and dollars out. Maybe add receivables in there and a few other metrics from the P&L. I'm not trying to be prescriptive here on purely cash in and out.

I do think there is a low friction way that companies could report daily certain metrics that over time would give their shareholders a sense of the company's health and trajectory.

Thanks.

T+0 all-year-round trading is good in many ways bad in others —like losing the real investor liquidity spawning window at 09:30 EST as opposed to pure market making.

Quarterly earnings were already a bad fit for many businesses so I agree with the measure to do away with them in principle. Someone proposed real-time and I think that would be a net positive if not very feasible. Yearly is a good compromise.

Companies that are not profitable YoY usually have a story so they probably can avoid having to rob Peter to pay Paul.

Then again, maybe everyone adapts and yearlies turn into the next quarterlies.

Good additional info. I used a shortcut I figured most people would understand without getting into the weeds.

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It’s a common complaint of value investors that boards (especially in this post-Sarbox world) are solely focused on quarterly earnings reports, to the detriment of long term strategy. One way to talk about the added and persistent value of some companies is to note that many of them have powerful, recalcitrant, or somehow anti-quarterly-cadence founders: buffet, zuck, you could make a list.

From a company perspective, compiling a quarterly report is a non-trivial amount of effort.

The company is employing additional resources (accountants) and distracting leadership (prepping talking points).

I'm not firmly in one camp or the other, but it is a substantial amount of effort to release on whatever cadence the SEC mandates.

When your decisions are driven by fear, anxiety and FOMO, knowing less can lead to fewer irrational reactions.

That’s why people hide information from bad bosses.

For the company it doesnt work well, you’re leaking too much info to competitors

There are multiples examples that are easy to see once you realise presenting information has a cost.

For example having daily morning 2 hour long stand ups provide more information for everyone involved. It's also worse for productivity and work atmosphere.

>This is a manipulation enabler.

One facet of the Trump administration that still manages to surprise me is now some action that is nakedly corrupt, or stupid, or destructive will be undertaken, and people will scramble to come up with explanations for why it might be done in good faith, or as part of some clever plan. We've been watching Donald Trump operate in national politics for over a decade (and seen him in business for far longer). Why on Earth would anyone ever give him the benefit of the doubt at this point?

> it’s also how America has generally operated in the past

It's not. That's why we have the rules that they are recinding, and why the US has long had among the the most transparent, safest, and liquid markets in the world.

Saying that 'it's always been this way' is a really concerted effort to bury one's head in the sand.

Sure but I should add I'm not saying this should be done in place of current reporting. It should be done in addition to. I'm advocating for more transparency augmented with periodic storytelling. Over time that noise becomes the pulse of the company.

Wrt Shannon, the channel capacity today vastly exceeds that of 1934 when quarterly reporting became standard. Give me more data and a filter any day over a once every 6 month black box. 6 month reporting is undersampling.

I give up, what does it say?