Equity traders fuel US bank profits as stock markets rally

By Saeed Azhar and Tatiana Bautzer

(Reuters) -Equity traders rode high in the second quarter, propelling earnings across Wall Street giants.

A buoyant U.S. economy, interest rate bets and rising geopolitical uncertainty have helped to fuel activity across trading desks, executives said as the banks reported second quarter earnings this week.

"There's a significant amount of geopolitical and election uncertainty around the world, but that tends to be an environment where clients reposition, and that tends to be a reasonably good environment for our sales and trading business," Bank of America's Chief Financial Officer Alastair Borthwick told reporters on a conference call on Tuesday.

BofA's revenue from equities trading jumped 20% in the second quarter from a year ago to $1.9 billion. It rose because of "strong client activity" and a better performance in cash and derivatives, the bank said in a statement.

At Morgan Stanley, equity revenue surged 18% to $3 billion.

The gains came from across businesses and regions, particularly Asia, helped by stronger client engagement and a "constructive" market environment, the bank said.

"You could see continued uncertainty based on how the next administration handles the significant macro challenges facing the U.S... That, of course, offers all kinds of opportunities," Morgan Stanley CEO Ted Pick told analysts on a conference call.

For example, existing client demand in cash derivatives and prime brokerage could lead to potential deal opportunities in investment banking, Pick said. Bond and currency trading could also benefit, he added.

At rival Goldman Sachs, equities revenue rose 7% to $3.17 billion during the same period, driven by derivatives, it said on Monday.

The business has surged alongside markets this year, Goldman's CFO Denis Coleman told analysts on Monday.

"Clients look to us on a holistic basis really across both FICC and equities to ensure that across all of the activities they're doing with us that we're finding some balance between helping them through financing activities, helping them with intermediation," he said, referring to fixed income, currencies and commodities.

JPMorgan's equity markets revenue jumped 21% to $3 billion, Citigroup's increased 37% to $1.5 billion, and Wells Fargo's surged 41% to $558 million, the banks reported on Friday in their second-quarter earnings.

(Reporting by Saeed Azhar and Tatiana Bautzer in New York; writing by Lananh Nguyen; editing by Rod Nickel and Nick Zieminski)