Charticle: Wall Street Proprietary Trading Revenue

The six biggest banks on Wall Street have all filed their first-quarter earnings now, so today we thought we’d examine the banks’ proprietary trading — and specifically, how much revenue from those trades drives revenue for the banks overall. 


Figure 1, below, shows the historical pattern for the last five years plus Q1 2026. 



As you can see, some banks drive more revenue from proprietary trading than others. Wells Fargo ($WFC) in particular seems least dependent on proprietary trading, never even hitting 10 percent. Contrast that with Goldman Sachs ($GS), which always drives a considerable amount of revenue from proprietary trading even though the overall percentage has trended downward from the low 40s to the low 30s.


Some more precise readings from Q1 2026:


GOLDMAN SACHS ($GS)
32.3%
JP MORGAN CHASE ($JPM)
16.9%
WELLS FARGO ($WFC)
6.7%


Insights like this can be hard to find simply by reading the earnings releases, since each bank tags its proprietary trading revenues in its own unique way. Calcbench, however, does have the tools to extract those nuggets of information and compare them across banks, which is why we were able to present Figure 1.


Calcbench subscribers can also use our database superpowers to track banks’ exposure to mortgages, auto loans, commercial real estate, loans in arrears, and other important metrics too. And if you want a spoiler: we’ll have a template for proprietary trading by second quarter so subscribers can get all this information automatically!

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