The last time we blogged about the folks from the r/wallstreetbets subreddit was during the height of the pandemic’s meme stock craze. I was pretty dismissive of them back then, but I’ve gotta tip my hat to them for the comments they recently submitted on the SEC’s semiannual reporting proposal. Not only do they raise some pretty good points, but they do so through an endearing and amusing mix of self-deprecation and sarcasm. For example, there’s this:

We understand the Commission is more accustomed to receiving comment letters from people who use words like “stakeholder ecosystem,” and we will try to keep up. A word on who we are, we are self-directed retail investors. Some of us are very good at this and some of us are, in the technical securities law sense, terrible at it. Many of us learned what a 10-Q was the hard way, which is to say we bought a stock, watched it fall 40% on an earnings release, and then read the filing to find out why. That is a stupid order of operations and we acknowledge it. But it is also the entire mechanism by which a generation of retail investors taught itself to read financial statements, and the Commission is now proposing to cut that mechanism in half.

And then there’s this:

We also want to register, respectfully, our objection to the suggestion that quarterly reporting is a burden the Commission can lift to help companies focus on the long term. The companies we trade are not being held back from greatness by the obligation to file four reports a year. Apple files a 10-Q every quarter and has nine hundred billion dollars in cash equivalents. Nvidia files a 10-Q every quarter and is worth more than the GDP of most G20 countries. The entire S&P 500 files a 10-Q every quarter, and the S&P 500 is at an all-time high. If quarterly reporting is crushing American capitalism, American capitalism is hiding it well. We have looked.

To paraphrase Jerry Maguire, you had me at “that is a stupid order of operations. . .” The only negative is one that undoubtedly would have been pointed out to the authors by their fellow Redditors if this was posted on that website – it’s a 750 word wall of text without any paragraph breaks.  The folks at Securities Docket flagged this problem as well, and commented “C’mon man! Just hit “Return” on the keyboard a couple times!”

Still, I wonder if Securities Docket may be pointing the finger at the wrong culprit. This seems to be a problem with a lot of comments on the SEC’s website that don’t attach a .pdf, so maybe the problem is with the SEC’s interface? In any event, whoever is to blame obviously hasn’t gotten the message that every Reddit user has heard repeatedly – “paragraphs are your friend.”

– John Jenkins