Wall Street's top regulator just proposed letting public companies stop reporting their numbers every quarter, and if you're a retail investor, you should probably be asking: who is this helping, exactly?

The Securities and Exchange Commission announced Tuesday it wants to give publicly traded companies the option to file earnings reports twice a year instead of four times. That would end a 55-year requirement that's been a cornerstone of market transparency since 1971.

The official argument? Quarterly reporting supposedly encourages short-term thinking and distracts executives from long-term strategy. It's an idea that's been floating around for years, and it finally got traction under the current administration.

Here's what they're not saying out loud: this benefits corporate executives and institutional investors far more than it helps you.

Think about who has access to information when quarterly reports disappear. If you're running a hedge fund with $10 billion under management, you've got analysts who can visit factories, talk to suppliers, and model out a company's performance in real time. You've probably got the CEO's cell phone number. You don't need quarterly reports.

But if you're a teacher with a Fidelity account trying to figure out if your Apple shares are worth holding, those quarterly filings are one of the few times you get the same information as the professionals. Cutting that in half doesn't level the playing field. It tilts it further.

The proposal now enters a 60-day public comment period, and the SEC can approve the change with a simple majority vote. So this isn't hypothetical anymore. It's coming unless there's serious pushback.

Supporters argue that European companies report twice a year and they're doing fine. That's true. European markets are also less liquid, have lower retail participation, and trade at lower valuations than US stocks. Not exactly a ringing endorsement.

And let's be clear about what "long-term strategy" really means here. It often translates to: "we'd like to not explain what we're doing for as long as possible." The companies pushing hardest for this change aren't the ones crushing it every quarter. They're the ones who'd prefer you didn't notice when things go sideways.

If a company wants to focus on the long term, nothing stops them from saying so in their quarterly report. The reporting requirement doesn't force bad decisions. It just forces disclosure. That's literally the SEC's job.

There's also a practical problem nobody's talking about: guidance. Right now, companies give forward-looking guidance every quarter. If they switch to semiannual reports, are they going to stop giving guidance entirely? Or will they keep doing it informally through analyst calls and investor meetings, creating even more information asymmetry?

The whole thing smells like a solution in search of a problem. Or more accurately, a solution designed to help one group of people while claiming it helps everyone.

Retail investors already face enough disadvantages. We pay higher fees, we can't access private markets, we don't get IPO allocations, and we definitely don't get invited to management dinners. Quarterly earnings reports are one of the few places where the information playing field is actually level.

Cutting that transparency in half doesn't make markets more efficient. It makes them more opaque. And in opaque markets, the people with the most information win. That's not you.