Morgan Stanley (MS) Beats its Wall Street Counterparts in Second Quarter 2014 Performance

During the ‘In the Loop’ program on Bloomberg, anchor and managing editor for Bloomberg Television, Stephanie Ruhle, reports on the better than expected performance by Morgan Stanley (NYSE:MS), which was the best-performing stock among the 5 largest Wall Street banks.

“Trading revenues in fixed income are less than expected, but guess what, they were still a drop, still, they didn’t perform as well as they did this time last year, nor as well as they did last quarter, but it’s better than what we saw from Citibank (Citigroup Inc (NYSE:C)) which is 12% down, (JPMorgan Chase & Co. (NYSE:JPM)) which is 15% down, it (Morgan Stanley (NYSE:MS)) was only 8%,” Sharing her comments, Ruhle said.

Speaking on James P. Gorman, who is the chairman & CEO of Morgan Stanley (NYSE:MS), Ruhle added that he is trying to optimize his trading assets by recently selling the bank’s commodity unit as well as by cutting jobs.

Ruhle also stated that for Gorman it is not all about fixed income trading, what he has been doing is that he has beefed up private wealth management, the banking business is also doing well and especially the equities division is giving a tough competition to Goldman Sachs Group Inc (NYSE:GS).

According to Ruhle, the Wall Street banks are in a kind of slow and steady situation, and we cannot expect them to show very high growth rates because of volatility being low.

Meanwhile, on July 17, 2014, Morgan Stanley (NYSE:MS) announced its second quarter 2014 results posting earnings of $1.86 billion, versus $803 million a year ago and net revenues of $8.6 billion compared to $8.5 billion for the same period last year. The wealth management unit reported net revenue of $3.7 billion compared to $3.5 billion a year ago. The Institutional securities unit reported net revenues of $4.2 billion compared to $4.4 billion a year ago.

“Our quarterly results demonstrated solid performance, despite a muted operating environment. We are seeing momentum across our businesses, with particular strength in Investment Banking, Equity Sales & Trading and Wealth Management – where profit margins hit 21% for the first time since the founding of the JV and assets entrusted to us by clients reached $2 trillion. We also continued to be disciplined on expenses, while focusing on delivering higher returns,” CEO James P. Gorman said.

Disclosure: none