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Comment by mozumder | Hacker News Reader

Why isn't financial information a real-time report, updated to the nanosecond?

Why are financial reports split into quarters?

The fact that we split financial data itself into quarters is what drives this short-termism. You now have an official timeline on performance metrics.

Databases can track financial data in real time. Just give real-time information, and let each stock trader use their own measure of financial performance, whether it's hourly tracking for day-traders, or years-long tracking for long-term investments.

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Because it takes real work to reconcile this information, make sure it adds up, and doesn't have errors. Doing that real time would be very very difficult for most businesses.

When a company releases their quarterly reports they're certifying that the information contained is accurate (and audited). That would be nearly impossible realtime.

Reports can be arranged so that reconciled & unreconciled transactions are separated into their own timelines. Auditing of transactions can happen daily.

It's not an impossible problem.

It's not an impossible problem, but probably not solved yet, as there was little reason to solve it.

(Also, I wonder if most corps would even want it; real-time doesn't leave much space for fudging numbers and other shenanigans.)

Corporations are interesting beasts. They don't always want improvements. For instance, I've heard from people selling "cybersecurity" products to enterprises that customers worry that when a system points out a potential vulnerability and later it gets exploited, they can no longer tell regulators and insurers that they didn't know - so in the cost/benefit calculations, improved security competes against plausible deniability...

Besides the less appealing stuff you mention, I don't see how it would do any good in a system which is already so shareholder-value driven.

Don't get me wrong, there's probably benefits to having it in real time but I think it'd make any top exec job a nightmare.

One obvious thing is that it would eliminate the brutal discounts that salesmen give at the end-of-the-quarter to meet sales quotas. They would now have a more continuous timeline to meet sales goals.

Wouldnt this make very little difference for regular investors because of how fast the market reacts to new information?

Suppose you found out Netflix had a $1 billion cost expense in real-time. The market would react to it faster than you or I could anyway. By the time you knew about it, the stock would have plummeted.

You'd have the same in a quarterly report surprise anyways.

Seems to me pressure on the worker would just go up, as now the shorttermism is microtermism. We need longer outlooks, not shorter. Who cares about traders?

> It's not an impossible problem.

You might have missed the actual problem; people aren't interested in these numbers because they like numbers. They are interested in these numbers because they want to make decisions based on them. The problem is that traders want early warning of change to position themselves in the market. Large volumes of low quality data won't help them. Spitting out unreconciled data that the company doesn't intend to stand by is basically the same as doing nothing.

If there are no surprises, the numbers are basically worthless. A decision made off the last quarterly report would be just as good.

If there are surprises, this is exactly the sort of thing that needs to be audited or reconciled. Surprises are probably going to be mistakes that would normally be weeded out when preparing a quarterly report. But if data were sent out in realtime, activity will take place based on essentially fake data. What happens if a bank communicates that they have run out of cash because of a software glitch in their realtime reporting? The situation would not end well for the bank; that could theoretically trigger a bank run.

Realtime data might be nice for some traders, but realtime mistakes could lead to some pretty terrible outcomes.

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