Automatic translation: Originally published in Finnish 19/09/2026, 06:00 GMT. Give feedback here.

This blog series reflects on life on the stock exchange from a company's perspective Can a listed company escape the pitfalls of quarterly capitalism by reporting to investors less or more frequently?In the United States, the presumed birthplace of quarterly capitalism, listed companies have been required to report their performance on a quarterly basis since 1970. However, discussion has now emerged in the US about abandoning the practice, as there are fears that short-termism is already harming the country's economic development. According to a Forbes article covering the topic extensively, surveys of corporate executives repeatedly reveal concerns about the costs and disruptions caused by short-cycle reporting. The problem is seen as the short-termism associated with the pressures of the quarterly reporting cycle. Companies develop a tendency to sacrifice long-term strategic investments, alter the timing of accounting entries, and make other sacrifices to meet quarterly earnings targets. I wrote about falling into a somewhat similar situation in part 2 of my blog at Inderes.The quarterly reporting practice may also cause speculative disruption or distortion in the trading of a share around earnings releases. This phenomenon is known as the "Earnings Game" and is characterized by exceptional volatility and mispricing of the share around the earnings release, which creates a fertile environment for market manipulation, insider abuse, or simply idle speculation that keeps the highly educated vest-wearing crowd sitting in glass towers busy. On earnings days, all eyes are glued to the bottom line of the report relative to analysts' consensus estimates, and then an earnings deviation for a three-month period can swing market capitalization by ten percent.

In the EU, the reporting obligation is more flexible. The transition to semi-annual reporting was made possible in 2015. A company can choose to report only semi-annually or to publish a lighter business review quarterly. Pure semi-annual reporting never became widespread in the Nordic countries. At the time, the Helsinki Stock Exchange had a number of companies that shifted to semi-annual reporting, but then transitioned to a lighter business review published quarterly. Apparently, company owners were not satisfied with the reduction in information flow. The shares of companies reporting semi-annually experienced a kind of quiet period for six months, and then on earnings days twice a year, the share surged in one direction or another depending on the results. Six months is a long time for investors to guess where the company's development is heading. A lot of tension was built up around earnings days. Inderes has chosen a model in its own reporting that aims to leverage the flexibility brought by EU regulations and keep reporting light, while providing maximum transparency to investors. We publish the mandatory half-year financial report semi-annually. Quarterly (Q1 and Q3), we publish a lighter business review. We believe it contains all the information essential to investors for the quarter, but our finance team is spared the effort of preparing, for example, a full income statement, balance sheet, and cash flow statement. As a special feature, we publish our revenue figures monthly as a press release. In this regard, we have taken things to the extreme once again – successfully, based on this experiment. Monthly reporting is a rarity both in Finland and elsewhere. We got the inspiration for monthly reporting from Gofore. Another IT service company, Witted, has also followed the example later. In addition, companies such as Kesko and Finnair publish monthly volume data. The reasons for our transition to monthly reporting were both internal and external. We reported development internally on a monthly basis to all personnel before the listing, and we wanted to continue the practice after the listing without messing around with insider lists. Externally, we wanted to provide investors with as real-time visibility into business development as possible. When information relevant to the investor comes out a bit more frequently, it makes the share more interesting, we thought. The additional administrative effort of monthly reporting is negligibly small. Our monthly financial reporting runs anyway, so pushing it out as a press release does not take much time. At times, we have struggled with what to write in the review section of the release. Since it is a press release for us, the choice of words cannot contain new information that is material or forward-looking for the share. When the change in revenue is, say, 4% year on year, it is difficult to craft great stories out of it. We have therefore kept the text section of the releases short and laconic in style. After four years, the experiences with monthly reporting have been positive. Monthly reports indeed spark discussion among investors, and occasionally they have been picked up as news by the media. I believe our owners appreciate the transparency they provide. And what surprising thing happened? Now I have to confess to my readers that I used a clickbait headline (we at Inderes have not adopted a policy of abandoning clickbait headlines). The most surprising thing about monthly reporting was, in fact, that nothing surprising happened. When investors already largely know the quarter's revenue, quarterly earnings releases have been mostly quite unsurprising, and price fluctuations on earnings days have been really small. At least in this respect, we have found a cure for the "Earnings Game" disease of quarterly capitalism by shifting to more frequent reporting instead of less frequent reporting. Perhaps the United States should follow Gofore's example.