U.S. Steel reported quarterly earnings in 1902, decades before any law required it.
The quarterly earnings call is a ritual of publicly traded corporate life, a scheduled conference in which company executives present financial results and answer questions from analysts. The practice exists because of a regulatory framework that took shape over decades, beginning with the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, which mandated periodic disclosure for companies listed on exchanges.1
The 1934 Act did not require quarterly reporting. It established the Securities and Exchange Commission and created the architecture for ongoing financial disclosure, but the frequency was left to evolve.
Quarterly reporting began as a voluntary practice. U.S. Steel published quarterly earnings as early as 1902, not because regulators demanded it, but to communicate with shareholders.2 By 1931, sixty-three percent of companies listed on the New York Stock Exchange voluntarily reported quarterly results. The NYSE itself began requiring most firms to report quarterly by 1939.3
The SEC imposed semiannual reporting requirements in 1955 and quarterly requirements in 1970, formalizing what the market had already made standard.4
The earnings call itself, a live conference with analysts, became widespread in the 1990s as telecommunications and later internet technology made real-time access feasible. The format created a rhythm that organized corporate life around ninety-day intervals, shaping how executives allocated attention and how investors valued performance.
Critics have argued that quarterly reporting drives short-term thinking. Warren Buffett and JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon wrote a joint editorial in 2018 urging companies to move away from quarterly earnings guidance, arguing it encouraged decisions that prioritized immediate results over long-term value.5
Most countries outside the United States require only semiannual reporting. The United Kingdom moved from quarterly to semiannual in 2014.6 The quarterly cycle remains a distinctive feature of American corporate life, a reporting frequency that began as a voluntary gesture of transparency and became a regulatory requirement that structures executive behavior around thirteen-week intervals.