JPMorgan Records a Rare Earnings Miss While Goldman Sachs Blows Past Estimates

By The News Desk, Previously

October 13, 2026

JPMorgan missed earnings estimates for a rare quarter while Goldman Sachs blew past them on a trading boom — a split-screen start to bank earnings season, with Citi beating and Wells Fargo mixed.

Earnings season opened Tuesday with a split screen nobody on Wall Street quite expected. JPMorgan Chase, the biggest bank in the country and usually the steadiest hand in the business, posted a rare miss. Goldman Sachs, its great rival, did not just beat expectations — it lapped them, clearing the consensus revenue estimate by nearly $2 billion. Same morning, same industry, two completely different stories, and a tidy little parable about where the money is actually being made in American finance right now: trading floors are printing, while the plain business of banking is getting more expensive to run.

A Rare Stumble for JPMorgan

According to the New York Post, JPMorgan earned $5.57 a share in the third quarter, well short of the roughly $5.90 analysts had penciled in. Revenue came in at $50.91 billion against expectations of $51.22 billion — not a disaster on its own, but the details underneath were softer than the headline. Fixed-income trading brought in $5.4 billion, missing the mark by about $550 million, and expenses climbed 12% from a year earlier while revenue grew only 8%. When your costs are outrunning your income at the biggest bank in America, people notice.

And yet — here is the part that makes this business so strange — the quarter was hardly a catastrophe. Barron's reported that JPMorgan's net income still rose 6% from a year earlier to $15.3 billion, and after an early dip, the shares actually finished the morning's early trading up 0.7%. Investors looked at the miss, looked at the $15.3 billion, and decided both things could be true at once: the machine is enormously profitable, and the machine is getting pricier to operate. A miss at JPMorgan is a relative concept, and Tuesday's version of it would be a career quarter almost anywhere else.

Dimon's Warning, and the Rate Problem Behind It

Chief executive Jamie Dimon used the occasion to deliver one of his trademark storm warnings. As the New York Post reported, Dimon cautioned that the financial pain households and borrowers are already feeling would intensify if interest rates climbed another percentage point from here. That is not an abstract fear. Traders, the Post noted, are now expecting the Federal Reserve to raise rates by another quarter point in December — a hike, not a cut, in a year when much of the market had talked itself into the opposite.

That backdrop explains a lot of Tuesday's mood. High rates are a double-edged gift for banks: they fatten lending margins, but they also squeeze borrowers, chill deal-making and punish bond portfolios. It is the same tension Previously flagged in this morning's overnight markets wrap, where the 10-year Treasury yield sat near a generational high and oil refused to come down. JPMorgan's expense growth, against that backdrop, reads less like sloppiness and more like the cost of doing business in an economy that will not cool off.

Goldman Sachs Has a Morning to Remember

If JPMorgan had the morning's frown, Goldman Sachs had its grin. The New York Post reported that Goldman's net revenue hit $18.68 billion — nearly $2 billion above what analysts expected — powered by an equities trading haul of $6.44 billion. That trading figure was up a staggering 72% from a year earlier and beat expectations by roughly $1.42 billion on its own. Barron's added that Goldman's global banking and markets division produced $13.46 billion in revenue, against a consensus estimate of $11.86 billion. The shares rose 1.1%.

There is a lesson in the contrast. When markets are volatile — and with oil elevated, yields near record territory and an AI-driven stock rally being questioned daily, volatile is the word — the firms with the biggest trading desks win. Clients trade more, hedge more and pay for the privilege. Goldman's quarter is what that environment looks like when it lands in exactly the right place. JPMorgan does plenty of trading too, but its bond desk picked this particular quarter to come up light, and in a head-to-head morning, that was the whole ballgame.

Citi Beats, Wells Fargo Splits the Difference

The rest of the morning's reports filled in the picture. Citigroup beat on both lines, with earnings of $2.85 a share against $2.65 expected and revenue of $23.85 billion against $23.72 billion expected, as Barron's reported; net income jumped 40% from a year earlier to $5.2 billion. Oddly, the shares still slipped 0.4% — a reminder that on earnings day, the reaction is about what was already priced in, not just what got printed.

Wells Fargo was the mixed bag of the group. Earnings of $1.87 a share edged past the $1.85 consensus, but revenue of $21.87 billion missed the $22.3 billion analysts wanted, and net interest income — the core engine of a consumer-and-commercial lender — came in at $12.52 billion, below the $12.66 billion FactSet estimate cited by Barron's. The shares fell 1.3%. For a bank that lives and dies by plain lending rather than trading fireworks, a soft interest-income number in a high-rate world raises the awkward question of where the growth comes from next.

The Wider Market, and What Comes Wednesday

Beyond the banks, Investopedia's morning snapshot captured a market that could not decide what it thought: Dow futures were up 0.9% while S&P 500 futures slipped 0.1% and Nasdaq futures fell 0.7%. West Texas Intermediate crude dropped 1.6% to $92.20 a barrel, the 10-year Treasury yield stood at 5.19%, gold rose 0.5% to $4,210 an ounce, and bitcoin changed hands around $83,100. In other words, Tuesday was not a panic and it was not a party. It was a market waiting for proof.

More proof arrives Wednesday, when Bank of America and Morgan Stanley report and the earnings season's opening act continues. If Goldman's trading boom turns out to be an industry-wide story, Morgan Stanley should have plenty to say about it. If JPMorgan's cost growth is the industry-wide story, Bank of America's numbers will show that too. One morning in, the scoreboard reads: traders 1, spreadsheets 0 — and the biggest bank in America reminding everyone that even giants can have an off quarter. Follow the rest of the day's business and markets coverage on the Previously news front, and catch up on the season so far in our sports pages if your portfolio needs a break from numbers.