



Masters of the game: Goldman Sachs’ traders may have a lesson or two to learn from JPMorgan’s
Subscribe to enjoy similar stories.Big banks in America have ridden a dealmaking boom that has helped drive demand for corporate loans and pulled record-breaking fees from the wild swings in financial markets. But the most surprising and intriguing news so far in the past week’s earnings parade of the US financial sector was the diverging fortunes of bond traders at Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase.The war in the West Asia has created a huge amount of uncertainty since the American and Israeli attacks on Iran began at the end of February, but mergers and acquisitions still got done and US commercial and industrial loans jumped by the most in more than three years.
Fund raising by companies was also strong for most of the first quarter, offering early hope of fat bonuses for investment bankers and traders. Not everyone benefitted equally, though.
JPMorgan and Citigroup both reported record quarters for their markets businesses on Tuesday. Goldman, too, smashed its best result in stock trading the day before, driven mainly by a massive jump in income from lending to hedge funds, but slipped up in bond trading, missing expectations and shocking investors.
Goldman Sachs leaned heavily into greater risk-taking in the first quarter and grew its balance sheet more aggressively than rivals. Its total assets were up 14% at the end of the quarter compared with the end of last year, the biggest quarterly increase in more than three years.
Read on livemint.com