Banks report record trading revenue

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Morgan Stanley Chief Executive Officer Ted Pick started summing up his outlook after Wall Street’s banner year for trading with four words: “The setup is ideal.”

After Wall Street’s five giant banks reported a record $134 billion of trading revenue from last year and an upswing in dealmaking, Pick and peers agreed it’s poised to continue — albeit with caveats.

“As a student of these businesses for decades, I would bet you that 2021 is not the ceiling,” Goldman Sachs Group Inc. CEO David Solomon said, referring to the last record year for lenders’ trading businesses. “The world is set up at the moment to be incredibly constructive in 2026 for M&A and capital markets activity, and I think the likely scenario is it is a very, very good year.”

President Donald Trump’s turbulent policy changes and trade talks have kept investors on edge — but for bank traders that has kept paying off as clients rush to reposition their portfolios. At the same time, his administration’s deregulatory efforts and the Federal Reserve’s interest-rate cuts are reviving a moribund environment for mergers and acquisitions — quickly filling dealmakers’ pipelines.

As Morgan Stanley and Goldman posted quarterly results Thursday after reports from their largest rivals earlier in the week, the market-centric firms added to predictions for another bumper year for Wall Street operations. That contrasted with other corners of banking, such as credit-card units that have come under threat as Trump demands a cap on interest rates. Industry executives have been fielding questions about how they may respond to that, even as they themselves await information from the White House.

Today's show features:

• Bloomberg News Chief Wall Street Correspondent Sri Natarajan breaks down earnings from Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley and Cathy Seifert, Vice President of CFRA Research, on BlackRock’s quarterly earnings and outlook
• Andrejka Bernatova, Founder and CEO of Dynamix, on why she believes smaller energy companies have a chance to benefit from US action in Venezuela
• Bloomberg Intelligence Global Head of Technology Research Mandeep Singh on earnings from TSMC and the health of the semiconductor sector
• Emily Green, Head of Private Wealth Management at Ellevest, on financial planning and portfolio management strategies 

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