#Goldman Sachs posts blowout profit on surprisingly strong trading

Goldman Sachs boss David Solomon can thank the traders he kept around for shocking the street with one of the bank’s best quarters in years.

The Wall Street giant posted second-quarter earnings per share of $6.26, almost double the consensus estimate of $3.78. That blowout beat was driven in large part by Goldman’s best trading quarter in almost a decade, pulling in revenues of just over $4.2 billion, blowing by the Wall Street estimate of $2.6 billion.

Goldman Sachs shares were recently up 2.1 percent at $218.45 in Wednesday morning trades.

While the bank’s traders benefitted from one of the steepest market upturns in modern history, the irony of Solomon riding his trading desk to victory is not lost on people familiar with the inner-workings of Goldman Sachs.

When Solomon took the reins at Goldman in the fall of 2018, moving over from his gig as investment banking chief, he made no bones about shrinking the size and importance of the bank’s trading operation after it grew under former CEO, and trader, Lloyd Blankfein.

“Our strong financial performance across our client franchises demonstrates the inherent benefits of our diversified business model,” Solomon wrote in a statement accompanying the results. “The turbulence we have seen in recent months only reinforces our commitment to the strategy we outlined earlier this year to investors.”

But it wasn’t all sunshine at Goldman’s 200 West Street headquarters.

Like JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo, and Citigroup on Tuesday, Goldman is also setting aside a whopping amount of cash to guard against what it sees as a very uncertain and stormy end to 2020 thanks to the coronavirus pandemic.

The bank announced it would set aside $1.6 billion in credit loss provisions for the quarter. That number appears small when compared to the $10.5 billion air bubble JPMorgan built this quarter, but it’s a tellingly huge number considering that Goldman is barely exposed to the consumer lending market but is sill allocating roughly 650 percent more money to account for loans defaults than it did in the same quarter last year.

One reason for that excess caution might be that Goldman joined the chorus of its fellow megabanks predicting that the US economy is set for a very difficult few months, estimating that US GDP will fall by 4.6 percent in 2020.