Big week for Wall Street’s largest banks and for finance nerds like myself.
Morgan Chittum here. I’m Fortune’s new senior finance reporter, and Allie’s asked me to write Term Sheet a few days a week (Dream gig!) A bit about me: I love reporting on big banks, asset managers, and other financial firms that have an outsized influence on our lives. So, what better way to kick off my first-ever newsletter than with a debrief on bank earnings?
It’s been a mixed bag of reports. Bank of America posted a third-quarter profit drop this morning while Morgan Stanley beat on the top and bottom lines. The latter was largely expected: Citigroup did the same yesterday. Wells Fargo, however, missed on revenue despite surpassing earnings estimates. The bank reported revenue of $21.87 billion, lower than consensus of $22.31 billion. It’s the third time in the past four quarters that Wells has done so.
The real surprise came from JPMorgan, the nation’s largest bank by both assets and market cap — about $881 billion. On Tuesday, JPMorgan missed on revenue and earnings for the first time in nearly three years, weighed down by rising expenses and weaker fixed-income trading. Meanwhile, Goldman Sachs, often seen as JPMorgan’s dealmaking peer, crushed estimates for both revenue and earnings per share.
After their releases, I was inundated with messages from colleagues asking the same question: Why did JPMorgan’s earnings disappoint while Goldman’s blew past expectations? Aren’t they peers? It’s a little more complicated than that. Like JPMorgan, Goldman saw some relative weakness in fixed income, currencies, and commodities, but the firm was able to offset that because of its enormous equities business, where revenue surged an eye-watering 72%.
But this is a deals newsletter, after all—so what does all of this mean for the dealmaking backdrop?
We’ve recently seen a slew of IPO delays. Oura postponed its plans in late September. Bamboo Insurance and Holtec Nuclear did the same shortly before that.
Still, bank executives say that won’t last for long. JPMorgan CFO Jeremy Barnum said on a media call that IPOs are being “delayed rather than cancelled,” describing the firm’s pipeline for deals as “very, very strong.”
“There are a lot of deals that need to get done that want to get done,” he told reporters. “Maybe in moments of a little bit of market turmoil, you see, especially in the capital markets space, the gap between buyers and sellers can widen temporarily before we find a new level. So we’ll see how it goes. But overall, the conditions remain very supportive.”
Goldman CEO David Solomon on the earnings call acknowledged that activity got “a little bit softer” in September. “The IPO market was wide open,” he told analysts. “It’s just if you expected a valuation and you got something 10% to 15% less, you might choose not to go forward–you might choose to wait.”
Matt Kennedy, a senior strategist at Renaissance Capital, told me something similar.
“After an active summer, suddenly we’re now in a rising-rate environment and investors are questioning AI valuations,” he said. “So, I think the IPO pipeline will take some time to digest that new reality compared to the enthusiasm they were seeing earlier in the year.”
Kennedy added: “It’s not like companies are canceling their IPOs. I think they’re prepping them, filing confidentially, selecting banks, and giving themselves optionality for when market conditions are ripe.”
To this end, Kennedy added: Despite these mixed earnings and a string of IPO delays, 2026 is still on pace to beat last year’s deal count, according to Renaissance Capital. And the year has already set a record for IPO proceeds–even without SpaceX’s blockbuster June offering.
Looking ahead, one of the “single-biggest catalysts” for a pickup in IPO activity would be an end to the Iran war, according to Kennedy. “That would bring down oil prices and maybe kickstart some of that deal flow again,” he said. “It might help with inflation and the rate environment too. A lot of these things are connected.” (A successful Anthropic IPO next month, per Kennedy, would also be a positive.)
See you tomorrow,
Morgan Chittum X: @morgan_chittum Email: [email protected]
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Joey Abrams curated the deals section of today’s newsletter.
The post Wall Street’s big banks deliver mixed earnings. Executives bet the IPO lull won’t last appeared first on Fortune.
