Is Wall Street’s trading gold rush over?
You might well think so after perusing a report out Wednesday morning from Barclays Capital analyst Roger Freeman. He slashed his second-quarter earnings estimates on Goldman Sachs and cut his price target on the stock, which he rates hold, by $20 a share.
The reason? Trading profits have “hit an air pocket,” he writes.
While all the bank and brokerage analysts have been mulling over how last month’s market turn will affect second-quarter earnings, few are predicting as big an impact as Freeman. He slashed his profit forecast for Goldman from $5.35, a full dollar above the analyst consensus, to $1.95, which is 50% below the Street.
A quarter of the drop stems from the earnings hit Goldman and other banks will take on the U.K. bank tax. But the bigger driver is a steep decline in the bank’s main trading operation, the fixed income, commodities and currencies unit.
Freeman predicts revenue there will drop 40% from its elevated first-quarter level to $4.4 billion, as the Greek crisis spurred traders to pull back.
“We believe these market headwinds, while certainly smaller than those seen in 2008 and early 2009, have impacted broker-dealer revenue generation in terms of client activity levels, trading revenue and investment banking results,” he writes.
Freeman isn’t the only one cutting estimates. William Blair analyst Mark Lane more than halved his second-quarter profit forecast to $2.10, saying the “pullback in global financial markets is putting pressure on nearly every major business.”
Yet even with the markets looking edgy and the ultimate impact of regulatory reform unclear, Lane continues to tell clients to buy the stock, saying its plunge this year reflects “extremely negative” sentiment that should improve as rule changes take shape.
Freeman, for his part, writes that second-quarter numbers for the banks should be “more divergent across the Street, driven more by relative positioning for the moves this quarter.”
That’s usually plays to the advantage of Goldman, which saw its shares rise fractionally to $135 and change Wednesday – leaving them a full $40 shy of Freeman’s reduced price target.