Goldman Sachs booked US$20.34 billion of net revenue in the second quarter, its best quarter since the firm was founded in 1869, and beat Wall Street's earnings estimate by 46%.
Diluted earnings per share came in at $20.98, against a consensus of roughly $14.40, and net earnings nearly doubled to $6.63 billion from $3.72 billion a year earlier.
Every major business line grew, which is rarer than it sounds for a bank this size, and management used the result to lift the quarterly dividend by 11% and confirm $4.0 billion of buybacks for the quarter.
The market's read was straightforward, with shares jumping more than 7% in premarket trade, pushing the stock within about 1% of its 52-week high.
The more interesting story sits a few pages into the results presentation, where Goldman disclosed that its supplementary leverage ratio slipped to 4.3%, the lowest among its major U.S. peers.
That is not a headline metric, and it will not move the share price on results day, but it is the constraint that decides how much bigger this trading and financing machine can actually get from here.
Global Banking & Markets, the division that houses trading and investment banking, produced record net revenues of $15.52 billion, up 53% on a year earlier and 22% on the first quarter.
Equities trading alone brought in $7.42 billion, up 72% year-on-year, and executives noted it was the third consecutive quarter in which the desk had beaten every previous benchmark set by any bank on record.
Fixed income, currency and commodities trading added further gains, though the equities number is the one drawing attention on trading floors, given the scale of the increase and the fact it follows two quarters that were already described as record-setting.
Investment banking fees reached $3.40 billion, up 55% on the year, with equity underwriting more than doubling on the back of Goldman's lead role in the SpaceX initial public offering and Alphabet's equity raise.
Advisory fees rose 17% to $1.4 billion as completed deal volumes picked up, and Goldman said it had advised on more than $1 trillion of announced mergers and acquisitions in the first half of 2026, keeping it ahead of its nearest rival by an estimated $425 billion.
Backlog signal
"Our record performance this quarter reflects the strength of our global franchise, the depth of our relationships, and our ability to harness the power of One Goldman Sachs," Chairman and CEO David Solomon said.
Chief executive David Solomon pointed to the investment banking fee backlog, which rose to its highest level in five years, as the number that carries into the second half.
A backlog is only a queue of mandates that have not yet converted to fees, so it is a forward indicator rather than booked revenue, but a five-year high is a reasonable basis for management's confidence that the pipeline holds up.
Solomon told investors large-cap corporate M&A volumes were up 90% through the first half of the year, and framed the driver as clients seeking scale to compete rather than opportunistic dealmaking.
He also linked part of the strength to artificial intelligence infrastructure spending, telling the earnings call that AI-related capital needs are pushing outward from core technology into energy, data centres and adjacent industries.
That is a real and observable trend across the banking sector this year, though it is also the kind of framing that tends to get used to justify almost any number a bank wants to report as structural rather than cyclical, so it is worth watching whether the backlog actually converts before taking the "early innings" language at face value.
Asset management
Asset & Wealth Management revenues rose 20% to $4.6 billion, with assets under supervision climbing to a record $4.04 trillion.
Higher management fees tracked the rise in assets, and the division also benefited from gains in the firm's private equity and alternative investment holdings, a book that tends to move with valuations rather than trading volumes.
Goldman used the quarter to lift its full-year target for alternatives fundraising to more than $125 billion, up from previous guidance, and flagged that incentive fees should step up materially in the third and fourth quarters on transactions already in train.
This is the part of the business Goldman has spent years trying to build out precisely because it is less lumpy than trading, and a 20% year-on-year gain suggests that work is showing up in the numbers rather than staying a slide-deck ambition.
