Wall Street giants, Citigroup Inc. C and Bank of America Corporation BAC are keeping alive the twinkle of optimism sparked by JPMorgan Chase & Co.’s JPM upbeat views on trading revenues.
On Thursday, at an investor conference in New York, Michael Corbat, Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Citigroup said that trading and investment-banking revenue for second-quarter 2016 is likely to be “up slightly” compared with first-quarter 2016.
Separately, Corbat also mentioned that net income for the second quarter is expected to be almost stable with first-quarter 2016. This, however, translates in about 28% decline on a year-over-year basis. Notably, the New York-based bank reported net income of $3.50 billion in the first quarter of this year while in the second quarter of 2015 net income was $4.85 billion.
The rebound in trading revenue continues for Bank of America as well, with the CEO, Brian Moynihan stating that second-quarter trading revenue is on track for “mid-single digits” growth from the year-ago period.
Moynihan noted, “We feel that for the quarter we might be mid-single digit for the last year. Our last year quarters were pretty solid quarters. So that’s kind of in line with where we’ve been and so we feel good about it. The team at fixed income has actually done a very good job and equities is down just because the market activity is down. So basically our fixed income business is two-thirds of it or more and its growing to double digits and equities is down and the best we can tell is there’s another month to go in the mid-single digit.”
Earlier on Wednesday, Daniel Pinto, CEO of the Corporate & Investment Bank at JPMorgan stated that trading revenue in second-quarter 2016 is expected to exhibit a mid-teens percentage increase on a year-over-year basis. According to Pinto, market activity was weak in the first two months of 2016. However, it saw a boost in March and higher fixed-income client activity continued in the subsequent months. This is expected to result in improved trading revenue in the second quarter.
Market revenue has been under strain since the last few years. Hence, for the Wall Street banking giants, which have been facing revenue challenges in fixed-income business amid stringent regulations, declining liquidity and maintenance of higher capital against risky assets, this positive outlook comes as a relief.
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