Bank of America's fixed income traders can look with schadenfreude at Goldman Sachs
Q1 of 2026 reporting season for the world’s investment banks is well underway. Goldman Sachs reported on Monday; JPMorgan and Citi reported on Tuesday; and Bank of America and Morgan Stanley reported today.
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Bank of America didn’t do great. For the first quarter of 2026, it had the second lowest increase in M&A (+47%) and Equity Capital Markets (+31%) of the big five American banks compared to the first quarter of 2025, ahead of only Citi and Morgan Stanley, respectively.
BofA's Debt Capital Markets business didn’t do much better, just 2.7% up, while Citi and JPMorgan's DCM revenues fell a few percent and Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs' nudged up.
BofA's equities team was the standout. The team posted results 30% in Q1 of 2026 on the same period in 2025, ahead of all other banks but Citi, who was up 39% on last year.
But BofA's fixed income, commodities, and currencies (FICC) traders were a disappointment, up just 2% while rivals such as Morgan Stanley and JPMorgan were up by over 20%. Only Goldman Sachs, which was 10% down, did worse.
It’s disappointing for Bank of America. It’s a team that has had great success in previous quarters, and a team that BofA has invested heavily in, especially in Europe. It’s hard to blame any specific team – the macro/credit split did not change substantially – and BofA did not point any fingers in its results disclosures. The implication is that its commodities team was rather flat, too.
What went wrong at Goldman? The firm's Q1 results pointed the finger at its rates and mortgage teams specifically. "That was basically just a function of the overall environment making markets," said the firm's CFO, Denis Coleman, on its Q1 call with investors. He also pointed out that commodities and currencies performed better. "We have big activities across all of those activities."
CEO David Solomon jumped in at that point in the call and pointed out that it was still the firm’s 10th best quarter historically. “FICC performed well in the quarter,” he asserted. Okay then.
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