Charticle: Wall Street Return on Equity

Five major Wall Street banks reported their Q2 earnings this morning, so what better way to demonstrate the speed and ease of Calcbench data analytics than to whip up a chart of the banks’ return on equity? 


“ROE” is one of the most important performance metrics banks disclose in their earnings releases. It’s calculated by dividing net income for the period into shareholder equity, and is expressed as a percentage. The higher the percentage, the more efficiently the firm is generating wealth for shareholders. 


ROE disclosures are also tagged and indexed by Calcbench, which means a bank’s ROE numbers are available for your inspection within minutes of the bank filing its earnings release with the Securities and Exchange Commission. 


We went to our Multi-Company page and to research quarterly ROE numbers for the five Wall Street titans who filed Q2 earnings this morning:


  • Bank of America ($BAC) 

  • Citigroup ($C)

  • Goldman Sachs ($GS)

  • JPMorgan Chase ($JPM)

  • Wells Fargo ($WFC)


We simply typed “return on equity” into the standardized metrics field on the left side of the screen to get the Q2 disclosures from today; then did a time-series on the disclosure to look back at quarterly ROE disclosures since the start of 2023. Took the data, dumped it into Excel, and the rest is in Figure 1, below.


As you can see, several banks — Goldman and JPMorgan foremost, but to a lesser extent Wells Fargo too — have seen ROE grow nicely since the start of the year. No wonder the banks’ share prices all jumped today and JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon said conditions were “getting close to as good as it gets.” (Of course, he also said in the next breath, “We just don’t know how long it’s going to last.”)


Honestly this chart is nothing especially insightful; we just use it to demonstrate the speed and ease of pulling precise information from the sea of disclosures that large companies routinely make in their earnings reports. We built this chart in less than two minutes, less than five minutes after the fifth and final bank in our sample (Citigroup) filed its earnings data at 9:41 a.m. ET.


You could run this exercise yourself any time through the Multi-Company page; or automate the process entirely by using our API to mainline earnings data directly into your own models. Email us at us@calcbench.com if you want to find out how!

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