Morgan Stanley has published a ‘banking report card’ that sizes up the performance of major investment banks in 2015. Finbuzz has obtained a copy of the report and below is a brief summary.
2015 certainly has been no cakewalk for big banks as monetary policy, market corrections, and debt crisis make profitability of some investment banks uncertain.
Banking analysts at Morgan Stanley have declared 2015 the year of US banks, as these institutions stand to gain the most wallet share.
Things are looking good for Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs, who are poised to continue to outperform given the high growth of US capital markets. This year major management and strategy changes are expected at HSBC, Credit Suisse, Barclays, BNP, and Standard Chartered in order to boost their return on equity, which is currently 3-4% lower than US firms.
Regional players like Wells Fargo in the US and the Nordic and Baltic Nordea in Europe are both set to increase securities finance because they aren’t as constrained as some of the other big players.
This graph shows the equities market share change in the first six months of 2015, compared to the same time period last year. The banks on top, such as Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley both performed as ‘winners’ in the first half. Barclays had an abhorrent first two quarters.
Goldman Sachs and J.P. Morgan were the overall ‘winners’ in equities sales and trading, whereas UBS and Royal Bank of Scotland were ‘losers’.
Morgan Stanley, HSBC, UBS, and Credit Argicole topped the fixed incomes and trading this past year. The report attributes this trend to ECB QE, which has given European banks a boost. This is surprising because the ECB QE and de-pegging of the Swiss franc drove many investors to divert their portfolios away from Europe.
