Big Banks Beat Earnings Expectations… Mostly

Wall Street’s banks more or less beat expectations, but there’s still good reason to be cautious.

What’s going on here?

Even though Wall Street’s biggest banks mostly beat expectations, last quarter’s earnings were a bit of a mixed bag.

What does this mean?

▶ Goldman Sachs sailed past revenue expectations, with every segment beating forecasts except for fixed-income trading (basically, buying and selling bonds).

▶ Citigroup’s fixed-income trading topped forecasts. And the bank’s services division, which manages money for big clients, helped it beat overall revenue and profit forecasts too.

▶ Wells Fargo, which leans more on lending than its peers, beat profit expectations as consumers and businesses held up, keeping loan losses in check.

▶ JPMorgan’s revenue and profit both fell short of expectations. But interest income was a bright spot, beating forecasts and prompting the bank to raise its full-year forecast there.

Why should I care?

For markets: Bank to the future.

Bank stocks have trailed the broader market over the past month, for good reason. Second-quarter trading revenues broke records, so analysts were expecting the third quarter to be relatively disappointing (and they weren’t entirely wrong). Plus, delayed and canceled IPOs raised doubts about how much banks could make in dealmaking fees.

▶ Meanwhile, a sharp selloff in US government bonds sparked worries that banks would end up sitting on losses (which contributed to the demise of several lenders – including Silicon Valley Bank – in 2023).

For you personally: No rest for the liquid.

Interest rates have climbed this year, and that should be music to banks’ ears: they can earn more from lending and from investing customers’ idle cash. But agentic AI could threaten the latter.

▶ New tools like Meta’s Muse could help savers put their “lazy money” to work by spotting better rates – or even automatically shifting their cash into higher-yielding money-market funds. That could eat into one of banks’ biggest and easiest sources of profit – and give investors another reason to swerve their stocks.

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Originally Posted October 14, 2026 – Big Banks Beat Earnings Expectations… Mostly