Is there any public company that releases earnings in realtime rather than quarterly and/or annually? Has this ever been tried? Is there any rational behind earnings being reported quarterly/annually besides it being aligned with existing regulatory and accounting procedures?
The procedures to produce an SEC report take time and aren't automatic. Management discussion, etc.
As a former professional investor quarterly is fine. i want mgmt focused on running the business, not reporting to investors. Anyone who wants more frequent data so they can trade the stock can hit the road as far as I care.
Interesting! Thank you for your perspective and insight.
Do you think that having some data reported automatically in realtime could minimize surprises such as what we see here? Perhaps then the quarterly reports could be more focused on describing the longterm strategy and market landscape?
Annual reports are for strategy. If you buy shares in a business that changes strategy on a monthly basis, you don't need more rapid reporting, you need to get out.
Go read Buffetts annual shareholder letters, they are free on the internet going back 40 years. He repeatedly makes the key point that your investments need to have some enduring competitive advantage, if they do you don't need constant upgrades, if they don't sell. Enduring competitive advantages don't disappear over night, if they degrade they do it slowly over many years.
If true it makes them terrible investments, because their future income streams can't be estimated with any accuracy, so they cannot be valued.
But in reality it's not totally true. SnapChat and (probably) Instagram have huge installed bases, but haven't yet figured out how to monetize them. They aren't businesses or investments, they have no strategy other than just pure speculation.
But Uber provides a service connecting riders with drivers that costs pennies per ride to deliver and earns dollars per ride in revenues. If you know how much Uber is spending to build out markets, and on unneeded distractions like UberEats and self driving cars, you can estimate the value of their core business. Uber's strategy has never changed, they've just obfuscated it.
Competitive sales teams in the enterprise sales world would be all over that data to try to spin a narrative and for competitive intel. Agree that it wouldn't be massively helpful.
None that I'm aware of. Actually, some people think that quarterly reports are too frequent and cause CEOs to think short term rather than long term and want to do away with quarterly reports.
You can google accounting and income statement, you'll see why it is done at least quarterly...as a business your operation occurs over a period of time, as such the impact on your books need to be updated accordingly...it is not just a matter of what makes sense but a matter of what is legal, there are accounting rules around how you do things like expensing (rent, depreciating assets..etc) and revenue recognition (can't do it before you deliver service/goods)...I believe quarterly is the wall street standard, I am not sure there is a law requiring it but your shareholders will probably demand it.
Don't know of any public, this is an interesting list of private (you're likely already aware of) https://baremetrics.com/open
In working with public company CFO's, I would guess 50% of the time & effort that goes into quarterly reporting is making sure everything came out of the SAP system correctly.
How would you goose the numbers in real time without an army of people curating what was reporting? Accounting is a bit of shell game at these levels, is it not? That is, we move one loss to this column, a gain to that column and suddenly we don't look __as bad__ as we were going to just a few minutes prior. Doing that in real time is super problematic.
I don't know, one hand I feel that exposes risk of versatile trading, on the other hand it doesn't seem like anyone would care, because growth/number is micro by seconds, and it takes days to see real spike.
