Private Fund Reporting Form Moving in Trump’s Direction, But Form PF’s Basic Approach Is Not Changing

On April 20, 2026, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) issued a joint release titled “Form PF; Reporting Requirements for All Filers,” proposing significant changes to Form PF. That is the confidential periodic reporting form for certain SEC-registered investment advisers to private funds. Some of those Form PF filers also are registered with the CFTC as commodity pool operators or commodity trading advisers, which is why both commissions joined in this proposal.

President Trump’s January 20, 2025, memorandum for the heads of executive departments and agencies titled “Regulatory Freeze Pending Review” figures prominently in the commissions’ proposing release. Specifically, the commissions noted that the president’s memorandum directed them, as well as all other federal agencies, to: (1) consider postponing the effective date of any rules that they had issued or proposed but that had not yet taken effect; (2) review any questions of fact, law, and policy that the rules may raise; and (3) for those rules that raise substantial questions, provide notice and take further appropriate action.

As it happened, the commissions in 2024 had issued regulations that made major changes to Form PF, but the compliance date for those changes had not yet arrived when President Trump took office in 2025. Accordingly, the commissions have extended the compliance date for those 2024 revisions, so it is now October 1, 2026. As discussed further below, the commissions’ Form PF proposal would reverse or modify a considerable number of the 2024 changes. It appears, therefore, that whether and to what extent the compliance date for the 2024 changes will be further extended depends on whether and when the commissions finalize their pending proposed changes, as well as the final terms and compliance dates for those changes.

In any event, the commissions’ most recent review of Form PF was not limited to the pending 2024 changes. Rather, the commissions took the opportunity “to conduct a comprehensive review that extended to the entire form” and, as a result, they “are proposing several changes to Form PF that are designed to eliminate certain burdens, streamline certain requirements, and make corrections, as well as other revisions.” These objectives also are consistent with various other presidential directives. For example, President Trump’s Executive Order 14192, titled “Unleashing Prosperity Through Deregulation,” aims to “significantly reduce the private expenditures required to comply with federal regulations to secure America’s economic prosperity and national security and the highest possible quality of life for each citizen” and “alleviate unnecessary regulatory burdens placed on the American people.”

General Rationales for Proposed Changes

The rationales that the proposing release set forth for each of the proposed changes are, in most cases, somewhat similar. For example, the most frequently cited rationales include:

• Reporting requirements that are costly or difficult for private fund advisers to comply with would be eliminated or modified so as to be less difficult or costly.
• The reporting information to be eliminated or revised has, for various reasons, turned out to be less useful to the regulators than had been anticipated when the current requirement was adopted.
• The revised reporting requirements, or information otherwise available to the regulators, will be adequate for the Financial Stability Oversight Council (FSOC) to monitor systemic risk to the financial system and for the commissions to discharge their investor-protection responsibilities.

In light of these general rationales, the proposed changes to Form PF also further important purposes of Executive Order 14219, titled “Ensuring Lawful Governance and Implementing the President’s ‘Department of Government Efficiency’ Deregulatory Initiative,” which targets, among other things, regulations that impose significant costs upon private parties that are not outweighed by public benefits.

Proposed Changes in Form PF Reporting Thresholds

The commissions’ proposed changes would:

• Raise the threshold that requires private fund advisers to file Form PF from $150 million to $1 billion of private fund assets under management. The commissions estimate that this will reduce the number of advisers that are required to file Form PF by approximately 50% but will reduce the amount of private fund assets as to which Form PFs are being filed by only about 2%.
• Raise the threshold that makes a Form PF filer a “large hedge fund adviser” from $1.5 billion to $10 billion of private hedge fund assets under management. Large hedge fund advisers are subject to substantial additional Form PF reporting requirements that do not apply to other Form PF filers. The commissions estimate that this change will reduce the number of large hedge fund advisers by approximately two-thirds, while reducing the amount of hedge fund assets as to which this additional information is reported only by about 20%.
• Require the SEC staff, approximately every five years, to consider whether these thresholds should be further modified.

The above-mentioned threshold increases will doubtless help some smaller private fund advisers grow their business and compete with larger and/or more established firms. In this respect, the proposed threshold increases further the purposes of those aspects of Executive Order 14219 that target, particularly, regulations that impose undue burdens on small business and impede private enterprise and entrepreneurship. The threshold increases also are directly responsive to Executive Order 14267, titled “Reducing Anti-Competitive Regulatory Barriers,” which targets, especially, regulations that:

• Create unnecessary barriers to entry for new market participants; or
• Have the effect of limiting competition between competing entities.

Moreover, it is apparent that the great majority of the other proposed Form PF changes (most of which are itemized below) also will further the purposes of Executive Orders 14219 and 14267: i.e., by reducing the burdens and costs of Form PF reporting, the proposed changes should enable smaller, less established advisers to compete against advisers that are larger or otherwise better positioned to bear those burdens and costs.

Form PF Requirements Proposed to Be Eliminated

The commissions propose to eliminate the following Form PF requirements that were adopted, or made more burdensome by, the 2024 amendments:

• A requirement to report specified performance-related volatility information for private funds that calculate a market value daily for any position in their portfolio.
• A requirement to report information about the amount of hedge funds’ assets that are subject to trading and clearing mechanisms at the end of each reporting period.
• A requirement for large hedge fund advisers to report hedge funds’ adjusted exposure via long and short positions for each sub-asset class in which a fund has a reportable position.
• A requirement that large hedge fund advisers report turnover information for specified assets in hedge fund portfolios for each month during their quarterly reporting periods.
• Requirements that large hedge fund advisers report detailed monthly information about their “qualifying hedge fund” portfolios’ exposure to reference assets. (Generally, a qualifying hedge fund is a hedge fund with more than $500 million in net assets.) However, “to mitigate the effects of losing this data,” the SEC is proposing to add a new “streamlined exposure reporting” requirement to a different portion of Form PF.
• A requirement that, for qualifying hedge funds, a consolidated table be included that shows a variety of detailed information relating to those funds’ exposure to various counterparties. However, to retain important information relating to fund exposure to significant counterparties and creditors that is relevant to monitoring and assessing systemic risk, the commissions also now propose to expand certain other relevant information that large hedge fund advisers must report with respect to qualifying hedge funds.

The commissions also propose to eliminate the one requirement that was made somewhat less burdensome by the 2024 amendments: i.e., the requirement that advisers to qualifying hedge funds report the percentage of collateral and other credit support that counterparties have posted to funds and that has been rehypothecated.

Form PF Requirements Proposed to Be Modified

The commissions propose to modify the following Form PF requirements that were adopted in the 2024 amendments:

• Requirements for how information should be reported when a reporting adviser advises “master/feeder” arrangements. A proposed revision to these requirements would limit the circumstances under which such advisers would need to separately report information relating to the feeder funds.
• Provisions requiring that, when reporting certain information about the investments of private funds they advise, the reporting adviser must “look through” to the assets of certain entities in which the private funds invest. Rather than such a prescriptive, rules-based requirement, the commissions are now proposing a more flexible “principles-based” approach. Specifically, the proposing release explains that “[t]he proposed changes are intended to provide advisers the ability to rely on reasonable estimates to report indirect exposures, provided they are consistent with their internal methodologies and the conventions of service providers.”
• Requirements to report information about a very broad range of “trading vehicles” used by private funds. The commissions now propose to significantly limit the scope of this reporting requirement so that it instead “focuses solely on trading vehicles that face counterparties and creditors or are reported on Form ADV as a private fund.”
• A requirement that filers report the industry exposures of their reporting funds using the most granular (i.e., four-digit) schedule of the North American Industry Classification System. That system also provides two less granular schedules of industry classification (which use two-digit or three-digit identifiers), and the proposed amendments allow filers to choose which schedule to use for this purpose.

Additional Changes Proposed by the SEC

The following Form PF requirements that the SEC adopted in 2023 (and for which the compliance date has already passed) also are proposed to be eliminated or modified by the SEC:

• The requirement that large hedge fund advisers report specified material developments “as soon as practicable, but no later than 72 hours.” The SEC proposes to delete the words “as soon as practicable” (leaving only the 72-hour deadline), as it believes that the additional time this change may afford will tend to make the reported information more complete, accurate, and useful to the SEC and FSOC.
• The list of occurrences that will trigger this 72-hour reporting requirement. The SEC proposes to narrow the scope, or eliminate entirely, several of the specified events that trigger such a current report.
• The requirement that advisers to private equity funds must report specified occurrences with respect to those funds within 60 days after the quarter in which they occur. The SEC proposes deleting this requirement, as it has not found such reports to be useful. Unlike its discussion of most of the other proposals to revise Form PF, however, the proposing release does not indicate that this reporting requirement with respect to private equity funds has been burdensome or criticized by advisers to such funds.

The CFTC is not joining in these proposed changes to the 2023 amendments, as they do not involve aspects of Form PF that are within the CFTC’s areas of concern.

Some Overall Policy Implications

Because almost all of the requirements that the commissions propose to eliminate or revise were adopted as part of the 2024 or 2023 amendments to Form PF, it is fair to view this as a rollback and reversal of Biden-era policies that were implemented under the auspices of the predecessors of the current Trump-appointed chairmen of the two commissions. Over the past several years, we have written extensively about how the SEC during the previous administration was engaged in a remarkable expansion of its regulation of private funds. Much of this regulation of private funds has been accomplished somewhat indirectly, via the imposition of additional requirements on such funds’ investment advisers. The 2023 and 2024 amendments to Form PF were cases in point.

The federal securities laws, however, draw a clear distinction between funds that are required to register under the Investment Company Act of 1940, thereby becoming subject to the comprehensive regulatory scheme provided pursuant to that act, and private funds that are specifically excluded from such registration and, therefore, have traditionally been regarded as largely beyond the reach of regulation under the federal securities laws.

Accordingly, we have pointed out significant questions about the extent to which the SEC’s increased regulatory focus on private funds is consistent with the policies and purposes of the federal securities laws. These include questions about the extent to which the SEC has been, in effect, regulating by disclosure, especially where the information required to be reported is not important for the FSOC’s monitoring of systemic risks to the financial system. (“Regulation by disclosure” occurs when an agency mandates disclosures about a matter in hopes that a party's awareness of the possible need to disclose will influence its practices around that matter.)

To be sure, the commissions’ most recent proposed modifications to Form PF will result in substantial reductions in compliance costs and burdens for many private fund advisers, and very probably will bring the costs of compliance with the form’s requirements into better alignment with its intended benefits. Nevertheless, the proposed modifications do not seem to alter the basic approach and objectives that the SEC has been pursuing in its effort to bring private funds under increased regulatory control.

Comments on the proposed Form PF amendments are due by June 23, 2026.