Ries: Quarterly reporting destroys roughly 5% of corporate equity value
Eric Ries · The Lean Startup Author on What Ruins Good Companies · May 26, 2026 · at 11:35
Eric Ries cites international academic studies and natural experiments examining the valuation impact on companies switching between semi-annual and quarterly financial disclosures.
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“So we actually know the valuation consequences of quarterly reporting, and it's roughly a five percent loss of total equity value. Companies are five percent less valuable when they report quarterly than semiannual. So the academic research on this is pretty good, and the magnitude of the cost, we're talking about so much, so many billions of dollars of lost value.”
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