Standard setters have expressed concern over the impact of complex accounting standards on the information gap between firm insiders and financial statement users. We address this issue by examining the relationship between accounting reporting complexity (ARC) and the market response to earnings surprises at the financial report filing. We document a weaker earnings response coefficient for increasing ARC, consistent with less market reliance on complex financial reports. We then examine whether ARC is associated with executives’ ability to trade based on their residual information advantage. Consistent with this expectation, we document higher returns to executives on trades executed in the sixty days following the report filing. The higher returns are concentrated in the trades of the CEO and CFO, who likely have a more profound knowledge of U.S. GAAP. Finally, we identify decreasing earnings persistence for increasing ARC as an underlying mechanism for these effects.