Hilarious piece in FT Alphaville on reddit group WallStreetBets’ response to SEC proposal to make quarterly filings non-mandatory.

If quarterly reporting is crushing American capitalism, American capitalism is hiding it well. We have looked.

One more point, and we promise it is sincere. The Commission was created in 1934 because retail investors got destroyed in a market where the people running the companies knew vastly more than the people buying the stock. The architecture of federal securities regulation is built on the premise that mandatory periodic disclosure narrows that gap. Cutting the frequency of mandatory disclosure in half is not a technical adjustment to a reporting form. It is a partial unwinding of one of the foundational compromises of the 1934 Act.

Still, it’s pretty amusing to think that the SEC’s Paul Atkins has looked at the standard reporting practices of the UK and Europe and been so enamoured by the dynamism, the long-term thinking and the bounteous IPO vintages that they want to bring the same standards to the dowdy US stock market.

Financial Times: Content 9cc70c08 6ee8 41ee 9be2 194b2de9deff