Morning Coffee: Bank of America traders are having their best Christmas ever. What Wall Street CEOs already hate about 2024

efinancialcareers.com:

“It’s the most wonderful time of the year (against a very undemanding base for comparison”.  Although investment banks, by and large, do not party like they used to, the festive season still means a lot more socialising, difficulty getting calendars in sync and an unwillingness on the part of clients to do anything that might complicate their year end.  Consequently, December is a month in which, notoriously, not much happens.

And that means that by the end of November, senior management has a pretty good idea of what the full quarter (and therefore the year) is going to look like, so statements like Brian Moynihan’s at the Goldman Sachs conference can be taken seriously – Bank of America’s investment banking fees will be down in single digit percentage for Q4 (itself probably better than the Street), but Moynihan says thetrading business is on track for “probably the best fourth quarter we’ve ever had”.

This is partly because overall trading conditions have been relatively benign compared to the rest of the year – at Goldman Sachs, CFO Denis Coleman said revenues are flat year-on-year.  But Bank of America will also, understandably, see it as a vindication of its strategy of allocating more capital and hiring top people to its trading business in the belief that there was market share for the taking.  Global head of trading Jim DeMare, in particular, looks like he was absolutely right to lose his temper last year and demand that everyone either raise their expectations or quit.

At the same time, the advisory and capital markets bankers continue to tick over, hope for a better 2024 and spend December wondering if anyone might hire them to work in private credit.  John Weinberg of Evercore seemed to be expressing the