Why tech investor Dan Niles doesn’t like Trump push for fewer corporate reports
President Donald Trump’s pitch to scale back publicly traded companies’ financial reporting requirements is a non-starter for Big Tech investors, Niles Investment Management founder Dan Niles told CNBC on Monday. “In technology, where things are changing so quickly, I really don’t want to be investing in black boxes,” Niles said in a ” Squawk on the Street ” interview. “The winner yesterday … may not be the winner today.” Niles’ comments come just hours after Trump suggested in a Truth Social post that public firms report earnings every six months, rather than on a quarterly basis. Less frequent reporting requirements would “save money, and allow managers to focus on properly running their companies,” Trump said in the post. The idea comes just months after Trump made moves that could change how other key pieces of information investors rely upon are collected and reported: U.S. economic data. In August, President Trump fired Bureau of Labor Statistics Commissioner Erika McEntarfer after the federal agency published lackluster jobs data that sparked concerns over the country’s economic health. Despite those concerns, the S & P 500 and the Nasdaq soared to intraday record highs on Monday, as investor interest in artificial intelligence solutions fuels demand for shares of AI-focused companies, including OpenAI, Meta and Google . GOOGL YTD mountain GOOGL year to date Niles told CNBC that Google-parent Alphabet is likely to gain a substantial lead on other Silicon Valley heavyweights amid companies’ jockeying to dominate the generative AI market, pointing to the search-engine creator’s ownership of a trove of video content on which its large language model, Gemini, can be trained. Google is “going to have the best app in terms of AI because … what makes an AI app smart [is] its data,” Niles said. “They’ve got the most free data in the world because of YouTube.” He added that Google’s better-than-expected settlement this year of a major antitrust case against its business leaves the firm with plenty of funds to pour into its AI initiatives. “That antitrust remedy was way better than any of us ever imagined,” Niles said. “They can pay to be the default search engine.” Shares of Google’s parent company Alphabet are up roughly 31% over the year to date.
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