Skip to navigationSkip to main contentSkip to right columnADVERTISEMENTMotley Fool Staff, The Motley FoolMon, June 15, 2026 at 7:51 PM GMT+2 9 min readAt the start of the century, The Motley Fool community helped change federal securities law.When the SEC proposed Regulation Fair Disclosure (Reg FD) – requiring companies to stop feeding material information to Wall Street analysts before sharing it with the general public, including everyday investors like us Fools – institutional money fought back hard. The big firms liked the arrangement just fine. Individual investors needed a champion.Missed Nvidia in 2009? This Rare Signal Is Flashing Again. In 2009, a "Double Down" signal flashed for a little-known chipmaker called Nvidia. For the first time in years, that same "Total Conviction" signal is flashing for a company 1/100th the size of Nvidia. Continue »The Motley Fool mobilized its community. The SEC received the largest volume of public comment letters it had seen to that point. Sixty-five percent of those letters came from Fools. SEC Chairman Arthur Levitt personally visited Fool HQ afterward. Reg FD passed. Chairman Levitt later said, "Two-thirds of our letters came from Fools. Without them, Reg FD would not have happened."We have the opportunity to do it again.The SEC has proposed allowing public companies to abandon quarterly reporting in favor of semiannual disclosures. You can read the agency's press release here. And while the SEC presents this as an optional, flexible change – companies can still choose to report quarterly if they wish – that flexibility comes at a real cost to individual investors.When you own a stock, you are a legitimate part-owner of that business. Quarterly reports are how your company shares the full picture with you: where the money is coming from and where it's going; what's working and what's not. You get the financial statements, the management discussion of what happened and why, the trends in revenue and earnings, Q&A with analysts – four times a year. That cadence is more than bureaucratic box-checking, we believe. It's the mechanism by which ordinary investors stay informed about the businesses they own.Cut that to twice a year and you've doubled the information gap between insiders and everyone else, which almost certainly would lead to more volatility when results finally do arrive (the market will have spent six months guessing instead of three).Put plainly: This is the opposite direction from Reg FD. Where Reg FD said more information, more fairly shared, this proposal says less information, less often. That feels like a step backward for the individual investor.Terms and Privacy PolicyPrivacy & Cookie SettingsMore Info