The winners (and losers) after a glorious Q2 for bankers and traders
Q2 reporting season for the world’s banks is almost over. After a monster day today in which Deutsche Bank, UBS, Standard Chartered, and Nomura (among others) reported, a picture is starting to emerge: there are some banks that did mighty fine. And some banks that did not.
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Who did well and who did poorly, however, is heavily stratified. Not all banks were made equal, however. Generally speaking, they don’t report their results in the same way; UBS, for example, does not break out debt and equity capital markets (DCM and ECM, respectively) revenue separately. Deutsche Bank, famously, doesn’t have an equities sales & trading team.
Nonetheless, we’ve compiled their self-reported data from this month to see which teams, within which banks, performed best. The results might surprise you.
Investment Banking
The best bank for investment banking in Q2 was Morgan Stanley.
That was somewhat surprising, as it did not have the most performant M&A or capital markets teams. But a strong and generally consistent performance, especially in M&A and DCM teams, levelled out the wild swings that other banks saw.
The work bank in Q2 of 2026 was UBS. Its M&A team did straight up worse than Q2 of 2025 – down by 5%, while global deal volume reached an all-time high according to LSEG, the market intelligence provider. LSEG also noted that UBS lost almost half of its global market share, and it fell from 8th to 13th in the standings.
It’s worth noting however that UBS described a “decrease in accretion of [purchase price allocations] adjustments” in its Q2 report, and without those, banking revenue would have been up by 33%. We have asked UBS to elaborate.
Sales & Trading
For fixed income, currencies, and commodities (FICC) trading revenue, the best team in the world by quite some margin was Goldman Sachs’. The bank credited its rates and commodities intermediation specifically for the increase, with credit noted as being a slight drag.
Goldman isn’t exactly doing spectacularly, however. Its FICC performance in Q2 of 2025 (against which we benchmark Q2 of 2026 performance) was the worst on the street, flattering this year’s Q2 performance. And its Q1 of 2026 performance was pretty bad, also the worst of its rivals. A swing from 10% down in that quarter to 32% up in this one levels out to 9% up for H1 - as the chart here shows, it was the second-worst performance among the big American banks.
But the crown for worst FICC performance in Q2 went, without a doubt, to UBS. The bank blamed a fall in both rates and FX performance on the decline; other banks with strong macro teams, such as Bank of America and BNP Paribas, also had a comparatively weak Q2 for FICC.
In terms of equities trading, the world was in ecstasy – revenues were up across the board, even at UBS. The happiest traders, however, were at JPMorgan. CFO Jeremy Barnum noted in the bank’s Q2 investor call however that the “particular set of things that happened in Equities this quarter” was “hard to imagine that being repeated”. Among other factors, he meant IPOs; pending Anthropic and OpenAI market debuts might prove him wrong.
The “worst” banks for equities, although still delivering a 43% increase in revenue, was BNP Paribas. In part, BNP’s equities lag was structural: the Q2 boom was driven by US IPO action, as well as index rebalancing. There was also a lot of prime (hedge fund) brokerage activities, a space where BNP is great outside of the USA, but relatively poor within. Most banks whose equities revenue boomed, such as Goldman and UBS, noted that prime activity was a big driver of equities revenue in Q2.
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