The biggest (bank) winners and losers from H1
The first chapter of Q2 reporting season is closed. The big five American banks have already reported; four yesterday, and one today. The European banks, as well as the global boutique banks, will start reporting next week. But which banks – and which teams in them – have done best so far?
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Without going in too deep into what an investment bank does, there are three main aspects to it. There is investment banking, which covers mergers & acquisitions (M&A), as well as debt and equity capital markets (DCM and ECM, respectively). There’s also fixed income, currencies, and commodities (FICC) sales & trading, as well as equities sales & trading.
The five American banks that have reported in the last two days were Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, Citi, and Bank of America (BofA) yesterday, and Morgan Stanley today.
Investment Banking
The most successful investment banking division of 2026 so far is, without a doubt, Goldman Sachs. The bank notched a 52% increase in revenue in H1 of 2026 on the same period in 2025. The results were driven by strong capital markets performance, both in ECM and DCM. In the second quarter, it credited a general increase in secondaries and IPOs for the former, and leveraged finance and asset-backed “activity” in the latter.
JPMorgan had the poorest start to the year from an investment banking point of view. This was generally from its DCM activity, which was negative in the first quarter and up less than peers in the second quarter. The bank’s DCM revenue is up just 6% year-to-date, less than the global increase of 7% that LSEG, formerly Refinitiv, reported.
FICC Sales & Trading
Morgan Stanley, by some margin, has had the strongest FICC trading team in 2026. The results were driven by strong performance in the first quarter of the year, which the bank rather predictably credited to war-related volatility in the energy markets. Its Q2 results, which were also reasonably strong, were primarily credited to its credit corporate trading team.
Bank of America posted the smallest growth in FICC revenue. The bank posted relatively poor results in both Q1 and Q2 – in neither case the absolute worst results, but consistently laggard. The bank doesn’t seem to think that it performed badly, but its presentations indicate that its historically excellent macro team has not contributed as much in H1 of 2026 as it did in H1 of 2025.
Equity Sales & Trading
There was no overwhelmingly dominant single back in equities sales & trading. Three did similarly well; Goldman, BofA, and JPM, which increased their revenue by 50%, 49.7%, and 48.8% respectively. Goldman, which posted the very highest results, had two strong quarters this year, never top of peers, but more consistent. The bank’s strongest performance this year was in equities financing, although it was strong in equities intermediation, too. Its financing team’s revenue is primarily driven by hedge fund activity.
There was, however, one bank that did relatively badly compared to its peers: Citi, which posted equities trading revenue “just” 42% up in H1 of 2026 on the same period last year. The firm performed the opposite of Goldman – it had an intense swing from a peer-leading performance in Q1 to a dead-last performance in Q2.
It’s important to note that Citi already has the smallest equities business of its peers (by revenue). It’s been pushing into quantitative equities trading and growing its prime brokerage businesses recently, but it keeps losing people; for example, its global head of equities quantitative analysis, Anissa Dhouibi, left for Millennium in April this year. Plenty others have left in recent months.
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