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JPMorgan JPM and Morgan Stanley MS crushed expectations and delivered blockbuster second-quarter results, supported by resilient trading activity, improving investment banking (IB) revenues and solid wealth management performance. However, differences in business mix, valuation, earnings momentum and capital-return prospects could determine which banking giant offers stronger upside potential for investors following their impressive quarterly performances.Against this backdrop, let us examine the growth prospects of JPM and MS and determine which stock appears to be the better investment at present. JPMorgan posted the highest quarterly profit ever recorded by a U.S. bank, reporting record net income of $21.2 billion or $7.70 per share for the second quarter. This was fueled by a huge boom in IB deals and heavy stock trading, and also included certain significant one-time items.Supported by a healthy deal pipeline and resilient M&A demand, IB momentum is expected to remain favorable. Additionally, JPM raised its 2026 net interest income (NII) outlook to approximately $105.5 billion from $103 billion, reflecting a favorable balance sheet mix, loan growth and higher revolving card balances.Its expanding branch and digital network should strengthen primary banking relationships, cross-selling opportunities and long-term deposit share gains. Continued investments in AI, technology, branches and front-office talent are expected to improve efficiency, service quality and risk controls. JPMorgan also retains flexibility for selective acquisitions and partnerships in areas such as asset management, data and technology, while prioritizing organic growth and capital returns.However, expenses are likely to stay elevated as the company invests in technology, marketing and growth initiatives. The bank raised its non-interest income outlook for 2026 to $107.5 billion from $106 billion. JPM’s mortgage business remains exposed to rate-sensitive customer behavior and housing activity and is a less dependable growth contributor compared with cards, payments and wealth management. Also, credit quality remains a watch item amid a tougher, more uncertain macro environment. Like JPM, Morgan Stanley posted solid second-quarter results, driven by robust client engagement and strength in IB and trading activities. Wealth management also performed well, driven by record asset managem...

​📈 Follow our live markets data and coverage. It was an epic quarter for investment banks. Goldman Sachs said this week that its stock-trading revenue hit a record $7.4 billion, up 72% from a year earlier.

Morgan Stanley reported a record $148 billion in net new assets, a 150% increase from the same period a year ago.

Concerned about an AI bubble? Sign up for The Daily Upside for smart and actionable market news, built for investors. It’s getting better all the time. Wall Street is celebrating a second quarter that delivered stellar earnings for banks, wirehouses and asset managers alike. With major indexes up roughly 10% so far this year, a rising tide is lifting fee revenue even as high-net-worth clients generating more wealth are increasingly looking for sophisticated advice. Things are going so well, in fact, that JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon used his firm’s earnings call this week to make a colorful boast about his wealth unit’s leadership. “It’s a great team of people, which I am fully confident if I was hit by a truck, which is not my preference, we would be fine,” he said. Sign up for The Daily Upside at no cost for premium analysis on all your favorite stocks. READ ALSO: RIAs Excel in Client Retention but Need a Strategy for Boosting Referral Business and Prenups Are on the Rise: Here’s How to Talk About Them With Clients Dimon’s confidence is backed by hard data, a trend mirrored across the wealth management landscape. At JPMorgan alone, profit in the asset and wealth management unit surged 33% year over year to about $2 billion, pushing client assets up 19% to $7.7 trillion. Similarly, Citigroup’s wealth division marked its ninth consecutive quarter of revenue growth, with profits leaping 51% year over year to top $580 million. Almost two-thirds of the unit’s new asset growth came from deepening relationships with existing clients. That massive asset influx was a recurring theme among the wirehouses (UBS reports later this month): Morgan Stanley’s wealth and investment management businesses crossed a historic milestone, reaching $10 trillion in total client assets after pulling in a record $148 billion in net new assets this quarter, according to the firm’s earnings report on Wednesday. While just over half of those inflows stemmed from client IPOs in the firm’s workplace channel, meaning they weren’t entirely driven by traditional advised clients, the sheer scale remains impressive. Meanwhile, Bank of America’s global wealth unit, which includes both BofA Private Bank and Merrill Lynch, saw profits skyrocket a whopping 42% to $1.4 billion, fueled by $4.4 billion in management fees. Wells Fargo rode the same wave, reporting a 28% jump in wealth division profi...

Image source: The Motley Fool. Wednesday, July 15, 2026 at 8:30 a.m. ET Chairman and Chief Executive Officer - Ted Pick Chief Financial Officer - Sharon Yeshaya Operator: Good morning. Welcome to Morgan Stanley's second quarter 2026 earnings call. On behalf of Morgan Stanley, I will begin the call with the following information and disclaimers. This call is being recorded. During today's presentation, we will refer to our earnings release and financial supplement, copies of which are available at morganstanley.com. Today's presentation may include forward-looking statements that are subject to risks and uncertainties that may cause actual results to differ materially. Morgan Stanley does not undertake to update the forward-looking statements in this discussion. Please refer to our notices regarding forward-looking statements and non-GAAP measures that appear in the earnings release. This presentation may not be duplicated or reproduced without our consent. I will now turn the call over to Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Ted Pick. Ted Pick: Morning. Thank you for joining us. In the second quarter, Morgan Stanley again delivered top-line and bottom-line record results, with revenues exceeding $21 billion and EPS of $3.46, marking an exceptional first half for 2026. $42 billion of revenue, $6.90 in EPS, and a 27% return on tangible. Across Wealth and Investment Management, total client assets stand at $10 trillion, fulfilling a Morgan Stanley strategic milestone. Our client acquisition funnel will continue to drive Wealth Management's superb performance, and with the passage of time, we seek to grow standalone wealth assets from the current $8 trillion-$10 trillion. Buoyed by active markets, our results reflect multiple years of disciplined investment and consistent execution, positioning the integrated firm to deliver strong results. Our advice-based businesses are working well together across our leading Global Investment Bank and scaled Wealth and Asset Management franchises to deliver industry-leading growth. In Institutional Securities, our deep client relationships, global footprint, and connectivity across businesses drove a record top-line quarter of $11 billion. Dialogue with clients remains high and strategic activity has momentum. In Investment Banking, Morgan Stanley led landmark IPOs in the quarter while helping unlock broader client pipeline...

The banking giant just showed off its profit engine, but now it has to prove this new power is permanent. Forget the headline beat. Yes, Bank of America (BAC)’s second-quarter numbers were solid, with earnings per share jumping 34% to $1.21 and the bank generating a stellar 17% return on tangible common equity. The market gave a polite nod, sending the stock up a respectable 1.9% on a flat day for the broader market. But the real news wasn’t in the results just posted; it was in the new bar management set for the rest of the year. This quarter was a powerful demonstration of the bank’s earnings machine, forcing a major upgrade to its own profitability targets. For an investor, this reframes the entire story. With its performance proven, the question for Bank of America shifts to whether this new, higher altitude of profitability is the new normal or just a temporary peak. This wasn't a one-off win in a single division. The performance was impressively broad. As management noted, “Every business segment generated operating leverage.” The capital markets businesses were on fire, with investment banking fees soaring 50% year-over-year to more than $2.1 billion. The sales and trading division was not far behind, pulling in $7.2 billion in revenue, a 33% increase from last year. From the main street Consumer Banking division to the towers of Wall Street, the entire franchise was humming. Here’s the number that really matters. At the start of the year, the company was guiding for full-year operating leverage of “more than 200 basis points.” After a blistering first half where that figure “exceeded 450 basis points,” management just lifted its full-year target to a range of “300-400 basis points.” That’s a large upgrade. It signals that the company’s ability to grow revenue faster than costs has become a core feature of the business model, rather than a temporary trend. This is the heart of the bull case: the scale and efficiency you’ve been paying for are finally delivering in a big way. Of course, there’s a catch. Analysts on the earnings call repeatedly poked at one key issue: the second half of the year faces much more difficult comparisons. Management was candid about it. As one executive explained, “most all of the NII build last year was in the second half of the year. We're just up against tougher comps, that's all.” This is the risk you have to weigh. The...

(Updates to specify revenue beat in the headline.) Morgan Stanley's (MS) second-quarter revenue s

Morgan Stanley's (MS) second-quarter revenue surpassed Wall Street's projections, with robust invest

The bank reported adjusted second-quarter earnings of $3.46 a share, blowing past Wall Street forecasts thanks to a surge in investment banking revenue.

STORY: U.S. stocks closed higher on Wednesday, with the Dow gaining more than a quarter of a percent, the S&P 500 adding over a third of a percent and the Nasdaq climbing more than six-tenths of a percent.A second day of solid bank earnings added momentum to an auspicious beginning to second-quarter reporting season.BlackRock and Morgan Stanley both beat quarterly profit expectations, with shares of BlackRock advancing over 6.5% and Morgan Stanley also ending higher.Strong earnings combined with more cooler-than-expected inflation data, in the form of June wholesale prices, helped lift stocks, says Melissa Brown, managing director of investment decision research at SimCorp."We saw some good earnings from the financial companies. And, you know, on top of that, there's just still the same buzz around the AI trade, around what's happening with semiconductors. And there's, we haven't really seen a lot of bad news. The inflation news has been better than expected, although I would argue still not good. So inflation is still higher than the Fed's target, even though it has come in a little bit lower than expected. But I think, you know, kind of all those things are conspiring to make it a good but not blowout day today."Among the session's other stock moves, PayPal surged more than 17% after sources told Reuters that Stripe and private equity firm Advent International have jointly offered to acquire it.And shares of United Airlines dipped in extended trading despite the carrier saying it expected full-year profit at the high end of its prior forecast, as the company's third-quarter outlook was short of Wall Street expectations.

Wall Street cleared this earnings season’s first major hurdle with room to spare, as the nation’s biggest banks pummeled profit forecasts. “Bank earnings are often described as a scoreboard for the financial sector,” said Ruben Dalfovo, investment strategist at Saxo Bank. “They are more useful as an economic medical examination, and the early numbers suggest the patient remains active, and dealmaking appears healthier.”

Investing.com -- Morgan Stanley maintained a constructive outlook on the aerospace and defense sector ahead of second-quarter earnings, citing resilient commercial aerospace demand, improving aircraft production, and favorable long-term defense spending trends, while becoming more selective after recent stock volatility and valuation shifts. The brokerage reiterated positive views on commercial aerospace, defense and space, highlighting durable aftermarket demand driven by sustained fleet utilization, low aircraft retirement rates, constrained maintenance capacity and continued engine maintenance needs. It also said Boeing's production recovery is gaining momentum, with the 737 MAX running at 47 aircraft per month and further certification milestones expected to support the commercial aerospace outlook. In defense, Morgan Stanley said investors continue to underestimate the likelihood of a roughly $1.1 trillion U.S. fiscal 2027 base defense budget, arguing that supply-chain improvements and expanding missile production capacity should provide further upside for the sector. The firm also expects space companies to benefit from upcoming launch milestones, improving order trends and NASA's commercial International Space Station procurement. Reflecting changing valuations rather than weakening fundamentals, Morgan Stanley downgraded Loar Holdings and TransDigm to Equal-weight, while cutting CAE and Voyager Technologies to Underweight. At the same time, it named FTAI Aviation as its top commercial aerospace pick, Northrop Grumman as its preferred defense stock and HawkEye 360 as its top space investment. The brokerage also revised several price targets, lowering targets for companies including Honeywell Aerospace, VSE, Textron, StandardAero, Loar and TransDigm, while raising targets for Heico, Curtiss-Wright and Moog. It said the expanding universe of publicly traded aerospace and defense companies has increased investment opportunities but also requires greater selectivity. Related articles Morgan Stanley stays bullish on aerospace, defense ahead of Q2 earnings Nvidia's new Alpamayo project: What it means for Tesla? This sector is 'poised for a big, beautiful year': Truist