Research Insight · From Section 3 of the SGaaS White Paper
Episodic Engagement
Hunziker et al. (2025) analysed 471 severe share-price declines of 25% or more across Germany, Austria, and Switzerland between 2018 and 2024. The events do not arrive evenly across the year. They cluster on the reporting calendar. This is the empirical signature of the structural defect at the heart of conventional governance.
38.9%
of severe corporate value-destruction events occurred in just three months — September, June, and October. The pattern is not coincidence. It is the calendar of disclosure.
Severe Share-Price Events by Month · DACH 2018–2024
Each bar shows the count of severe (≥25%) monthly share-price declines for that calendar month, summed across the seven-year window (n=471).
Published peak month
Modelled to total 471 events
Selected Month
September
The annual peak. Q2 / H1 reporting completes in DACH markets; pre-Q3 prep begins.
Severe Events
70
14.9% of the 471-event annual total
Data Provenance
Hunziker et al. (2025)
Published as a top-3 peak month
Methodology. September (70 events), June (57), and October (56) are the three peaks explicitly identified by Hunziker et al. (2025) as the heaviest reporting months. The other nine monthly values shown here are modelled to total the paper’s published 471 events, distributed according to the DACH quarterly reporting cycle (Q4 / annual results in February–March; Q1 results in April–May; H1 results in August; Q3 results in November). These modelled values are clearly marked as such on hover.
What the cluster proves
Three months hold 38.9% of severe events. The remaining nine months hold the rest. This is not an artefact of when risk crystallises — it is an artefact of when risk is recognised.
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Risk does not follow the reporting calendar
Material risk accumulates continuously. Its public recognition arrives on a quarterly schedule. The cluster is the moment at which the market and the board learn what was already true.
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Boards engage on the same rhythm
When governance attention is indexed to reporting cycles, the board learns of material exposures at the moment the market does. There is no window of foreknowledge in which to act.
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Episodic engagement is structural
This is not a failure of effort. It is a failure of cadence. The defect is built into how boards are scheduled to consume risk information, not into how seriously they take it.
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Continuous challenge changes the cadence
A retained adversarial function operates on the calendar of risk, not the calendar of disclosure. It produces governance intelligence between the reporting episodes, when the cluster is forming.
The Structural Defect
Material risk does not crystallise on the reporting rhythm; its public recognition does. Boards whose engagement with risk is indexed to the same rhythm learn of material exposures at roughly the moment the market does, with no advantage of foreknowledge and no window in which to act.
From Strategic Governance as a Service, Section 3 — Marentis Labs, 2026.
From the SGaaS White Paper
Read the full research
The interactive above is one of seven drawn from the 90-page Strategic Governance as a Service research paper. Download the full paper or schedule a confidential conversation.