What Is a Quiet Period?

Prior to a company’s Initial Public Offering (IPO), the quiet period is an SEC-mandated embargo on promotional publicity. This prohibits management teams or their marketing agents from making forecasts or expressing any opinions about the value of their company.

 

For publicly-traded stocks, the four weeks before the close of a business quarter is also known as a quiet period. Here again, corporate insiders are forbidden to speak to the public about their business to avoid tipping certain analysts, journalists, investors, and portfolio managers to an unfair advantage – often to avoid the appearance of insider information, whether real or perceived.

 

KEY TAKEAWAYS

  • A quiet period is a set amount of time in which a company's management and marketing teams cannot share opinions or additional information about the firm.
  • The purpose of the quiet period is to preserve objectivity and avoid the appearance of a company providing insider information to select investors.
  • With an IPO, the quiet period stretches from the time a company files registration paperwork with U.S. regulators through the 40 days after the stock starts trading.
  • With publicly-traded companies, the quiet period is a reference to the four weeks before the end of the business quarter.

Understanding the Quiet Period

After a company files registration for newly issued securities (stocks and bonds) with the SEC, their management team, investment bankers and lawyers go on a roadshow. During a series of presentations, potential institutional investors will ask questions about the company to gather investment research. Management teams must not offer any new information that is not already contained in the registration statement. But it still offers some level of informational gathering.

 

The quiet period begins when the registration statement is made effective and lasts for 40 days after the stock begins trading. Its purpose is to create a level playing field for all investors by ensuring that everyone has access to the same information at the same time.

 

It’s not uncommon for the SEC to delay an IPO if a quiet period has been violated; interested parties take the process seriously as there’s a lot of money on the line.

 
 

The term quiet period has two references in business, one relating to an initial public offering (IPO) and one to the end of the business quarter for a corporation.

Quiet Period Violation Example

Debating the objectives of quiet periods and the SEC’s enforcement are commonplace in financial markets. When quiet periods are seen as having been violated and ultimately to have benefitted select parties, legal action is usually taken.

 

In a recent example, shareholders alleged impropriety regarding the quiet period surrounding Facebook's IPO in 2012, arguing that certain information that should have been kept quiet may have been shared selectively, unfairly benefitting certain parties. Facebook's IPO prompted more than a dozen shareholder lawsuits accusing the social networking company and its underwriters of obscuring its weakened growth forecasts ahead of the listing. Small investors complained they were at an informational disadvantage after underwriters’ research analyst supposedly passed new and useful earnings estimates to large investors only.