Goldman Sachs Earnings: Record Fees, Fewer Deals Than 2021

By Stock Titan Editorial Team Published October 13, 2026, 08:19 AM EDT

Goldman’s third quarter in numbers

Goldman Sachs had its second-best quarter for revenue, with net revenues of $18.68 billion for the three months to September 30, 2026, up 23% from $15.18 billion a year earlier and down 8% from the second quarter, according to the Form 8-K the bank filed at 7:32 AM ET on October 13. Net earnings were $5.29 billion and diluted earnings per share (profit divided by every share that could exist) were $17.01, against $12.25 in the third quarter of 2025 and $20.98 in the second quarter of 2026, per the press release attached to the filing.

Part of the 39% jump in earnings per share came from a smaller share count, since Goldman bought back $3.00 billion of its own stock in the quarter and its average diluted shares fell 4.4% from a year earlier (301.1 million against 315.0 million). Profit for common shareholders rose 33%, which is the cleaner measure of how much more the business earned. The bank also gave about $450 million to Goldman Sachs Gives, its charity fund, in the quarter, which it says cut earnings by about $1.00 a share.

The part that matters for the boom question is where the extra money came from. Revenue rose $3.50 billion from a year earlier, and Equities, the desk that trades stocks for clients and lends to hedge funds and other investors, rose $2.71 billion on its own, from $3.74 billion to $6.44 billion. That is about 77% of the whole increase in our arithmetic from the release’s segment table, and most of the Equities gain came from financing, the lending side, which rose from $1.72 billion to $3.37 billion. Advisory, the line that earns fees for advising companies on mergers and takeovers, rose $250 million, about 7% of the increase.

Source: Goldman Sachs third quarter 2026 release, segment net revenues table. Equity underwriting is the fee for selling new shares, including IPOs; debt underwriting is the fee for selling new bonds.

The investment banking lines did grow, and the earnings presentation calls the Advisory figure “record net revenues in Advisory”, which it says “reflected an increase in completed mergers and acquisitions volumes”. The same document reports that the backlog, Goldman’s estimate of future fees from deals it is working on, “decreased QoQ, primarily driven by a decrease in Advisory”. In the release the backlog “decreased compared with the end of the second quarter of 2026 and decreased slightly compared with the end of 2025.”

Goldman’s record against 2021

Goldman’s record deal advice quarter is a near tie with 2021, since the $1,654 million it booked in the third quarter of 2026 is $6 million, or 0.4%, above the $1,648 million of the third quarter of 2021, a figure the bank’s third quarter 2021 release also called “record quarterly net revenues in Financial advisory” at the time.

Over nine months the picture splits in two. Advisory revenue for January to September 2026 was $4,526 million, about 13% above the $4,022 million of the same months in 2021, and debt underwriting was 7% higher at $2,747 million. Equity underwriting, the fee line that moves with IPOs and other share sales, was $2,186 million, which is 45% below the $3,986 million Goldman earned from it in the first nine months of 2021. For the full year 2021 the bank reported record revenue in each of the three lines.

Show the data

Category	Nine months 2021	Nine months 2026
Advisory	$4.022B	$4.526B
Debt underwriting	$2.556B	$2.747B
Equity underwriting	$3.986B	$2.186B

Goldman attributes the Advisory record to “an increase in completed mergers and acquisitions volumes”. The figure tracks fees on deals that reached completion, which is a different thing from the number of new deals being announced. The bank also cites Dealogic data ranking it first in announced and completed mergers from January 1 to September 30, 2026.

Added together, the three fee lines in the chart came to $9.46 billion for January to September 2026 against $10.56 billion in the same months of 2021, about 10% less, because the fall in equity underwriting outweighs the gains in the other two. So the record belongs to one line, and Goldman’s deal fees as a whole are still below their 2021 pace.

The count of deals companies announced

StockTitan counted 1,068 press releases announcing a deal to buy, sell or merge a business in the first nine months of 2026, against 1,445 in the same months of 2021, which is 26% fewer. They came from 849 different companies, against 1,054 in 2021, about 19% fewer. The 2026 figure is still 9% above the 978 of 2025 and 27% above the 840 of 2023, the lowest nine months in our data, so deal activity has clearly recovered. It has not returned to the 2021 pace.

The third quarter alone carried 375 announcement releases, up from 361 in the second quarter and 346 a year earlier, and still well short of the 488 counted in the third quarter of 2021. Completions, releases saying a merger or acquisition has closed, came closer to 2021 at 857 in nine months against 952, which fits the record in Goldman’s Advisory line, since those fees arrive when deals close.

Show the data

Category	Deal announcement releases	Deal completion releases
21Q1	439	252
21Q2	518	326
21Q3	488	374
21Q4	493	445
22Q1	379	291
22Q2	366	309
22Q3	307	290
22Q4	306	228
23Q1	249	221
23Q2	297	194
23Q3	294	199
23Q4	317	256
24Q1	276	220
24Q2	302	231
24Q3	325	234
24Q4	305	265
25Q1	310	225
25Q2	322	215
25Q3	346	260
25Q4	390	261
26Q1	332	285
26Q2	361	265
26Q3	375	307

A count of press releases is not a count of every deal in the world. It covers companies listed in the US and on the over-the-counter market that publish their news through the wires StockTitan reads, and a takeover announced by both the buyer and the target in two separate releases is counted twice, in every year alike. The same rule runs on both years, so the comparison between them is the useful part, though it cannot rule out every change in how companies word their headlines. The How we counted section shows the control we ran, which makes a change in our own coverage an unlikely explanation for the drop.

What the count does capture is breadth, meaning how many companies take part. It carries no deal values, so on its own it cannot say how large the 2026 deals are; it says that fewer companies announced them than in 2021, while the dollar totals in the next section stayed near the 2021 peak.

Dollars near 2021, a smaller count

The dollar totals in 2026 are close to the 2021 peak, and where a research firm reports both money and counts for the same market, the money is spread over fewer, larger deals. Mergermarket, a deal data service of ION Analytics, puts global mergers and acquisitions at $4.44 trillion across 32,419 deals in the first nine months of 2026, up 27% from a year earlier, “making 9M26 the second strongest first nine months on record, after the USD 4.55tn peak in 9M21”, in its October 1 report.

The same report says more than 72% of the nine-month total came in the first half, North American deal volume fell 23% in the third quarter from a year earlier, and the number of North American megadeals dropped to six in the third quarter from 19 in the second.

For share sales, Dealogic, another ION Analytics service, gives value and count for the same market in both years. US equity issuance reached $586.7 billion from 1,606 deals in the first nine months of 2026, “compared with USD 579.7bn from 2000 transactions for 9M21”, per its October 6 report. That is slightly more money from about 20% fewer deals, and the average deal size works out to $365 million against $290 million in 2021, about 26% larger, in our arithmetic from Dealogic’s own figures.

Dealogic describes the third quarter in the same terms, saying third quarter global equity issuance was well above the third quarter of 2025 but “came from 1,774 deals compared to 2,171, as capital was concentrated in a far smaller number of very large transactions.” Samuel Kerr, Dealogic’s head of global ECM (equity capital markets) and Mergermarket EMEA, described the contrast with 2021 in the same report, speaking of “the concentration of equity issuance into technology, rather than a broad-based market recovery like in 2021”.

Our release counts are consistent with that picture, since they show fewer companies announcing deals while the outside totals show the money staying near the peak. We do not divide one into the other, because the scopes differ (Mergermarket counts the whole world, our releases come mostly from US-listed companies), and the size comparison above rests on Dealogic’s figures alone.

IPOs trail the deal rebound

New stock listings are the weakest part of the 2026 deal market by count. StockTitan’s press release database holds 216 releases announcing the pricing of an initial public offering in the first nine months of 2026, against 577 in the same months of 2021, a drop of 63%. The third quarter had 57, down from 80 in the second quarter and 79 a year earlier.

Show the data

Category	All IPO pricing releases	Flagged as likely SPAC
21Q1	296	143
21Q2	149	30
21Q3	132	48
21Q4	189	94
22Q1	50	28
22Q2	28	7
22Q3	28	2
22Q4	13	5
23Q1	35	6
23Q2	28	4
23Q3	37	3
23Q4	24	6
24Q1	35	6
24Q2	46	4
24Q3	53	12
24Q4	65	16
25Q1	70	14
25Q2	75	35
25Q3	79	18
25Q4	69	27
26Q1	79	47
26Q2	80	35
26Q3	57	29

Some of the 2021 total was a fad for blank-check companies (SPACs, shells that list first and look for a business to buy later), and releases whose headlines contain “acquisition” or “merger”, which our screen treats as likely SPACs, made up 221 of the 577 in 2021. After excluding the releases our headline screen flags, the count is 105 in 2026 against 356 in 2021; the screen misses SPACs with other names and can flag a headline that only mentions an acquisition, so this remainder is not a verified count of operating companies.

If you want to see what an IPO filing contains, our guide to reading an S-1 registration statement walks through one, and the history of the SPAC wave is in our piece on reverse mergers and SPAC remnants.

The dollar figures again tell a different story because of size. Dealogic reports that SpaceX raised $86.2 billion in its IPO in the second quarter, a record, while global IPO volume in the third quarter fell to $53.7 billion from $58.5 billion a year earlier, and it says “smaller issuers appear to be crowded out by the megadeals”. Goldman’s own equity underwriting line rose 43% from a year earlier, which the bank puts down mainly to IPOs and secondary offerings, and fell 32% from the second quarter to $666 million.

JPMorgan and Wells Fargo on the same morning

Two other large banks reported the same morning, with investment banking up 14% at JPMorgan and 10% at Wells Fargo, against 21% for Goldman’s investment banking fees. JPMorgan Chase said its investment banking fees were $3.0 billion, up 14%, “predominantly driven by higher advisory fees”, and chairman Jamie Dimon said markets revenue and investment banking fees rose “helped by strong levels of client activity, although activity did moderate somewhat during the quarter”, in its third quarter release. Its equity markets revenue rose 49%.

Wells Fargo reported M&A revenue up 30% and equity capital markets and investment grade underwriting fees each up 33% within its corporate and investment bank, while its equities trading revenue rose 21% and its FICC revenue fell 7%, per its third quarter release. Both banks’ consumer lending results are covered in our article on JPMorgan and Wells Fargo earnings and credit card defaults.

At Goldman and JPMorgan stock trading grew faster than deal fees (Goldman’s Equities up 72%, JPMorgan’s equity markets up 49%), and bond trading was flat or lower at all three banks. At Wells Fargo the investment banking gain came from investment grade bond sales, share sales and M&A advice, “partially offset by lower leveraged finance revenue”. That is solid growth from a year earlier, and it still leaves our count of deal announcements below 2021.

Signals of a fading or widening boom

A few figures will show which way this goes over the coming months, and the banks and the data firms publish most of them every quarter. Goldman’s backlog is the first one. It fell in the third quarter, mainly in Advisory, and a backlog moves with new mandates, completions, cancellations and revisions to the fees expected on existing deals, which the disclosure does not separate. A rise at the fourth quarter results would mean a larger estimate of future fees.

The count itself is another. Our quarterly tally of announcement releases rose for two quarters in a row to 375, still below every quarter of 2021. Every quarter of 2021 had at least 439, so a quarter above 450 would put the count back in that range, while a drop back toward 300 would match the 2023 and 2024 range. IPO pricing releases were 57 in the third quarter, and for comparison every quarter of 2021 had at least 132.

Financing costs matter too. The Federal Reserve raised its target range on September 16 (our article on the decision explains it), Dealogic’s report says “rapidly rising debt yields are complicating the outlook for corporate earnings”, and both ION Analytics reports name geopolitical uncertainty as a drag on activity. Goldman’s own presentation lists CEO confidence, sponsor activity (buyout firms), productivity gains and the regulatory backdrop among the risk factors in its forward-looking statements. None of these signals settles the question alone.

How we counted

We counted visible press releases in StockTitan’s news database by calendar quarter (Eastern Time), using their headlines. A deal announcement is a headline that contains phrases such as “definitive agreement”, “merger agreement”, “to acquire”, “to be acquired” or “agrees to merge”, after removing shareholder law firm notices, completions, SPAC combinations, letters of intent, shareholder votes, terminations and regulatory approvals. A completion is a headline that says an acquisition, merger or sale was completed or closed. An IPO pricing is a headline that says a company priced its initial public offering. We read random samples of the matched headlines by hand to check they were what the rule says. The queries ran on October 13, 2026.

To make sure a smaller count does not just mean we carried fewer releases, we checked two controls for the first nine months of each year. Results releases (headlines reporting results or earnings) were 11,947 in 2021 and 12,039 in 2026, almost unchanged. Our wire mix did change, so we repeated the count on the two wires whose results-release counts held steady, Globe Newswire and Business Wire, where results releases rose 3%: deal announcements fell from 899 to 680 (down 24%) and IPO pricings from 429 to 181 (down 58%), close to the figures for all wires.

That makes a coverage change an unlikely explanation, though it does not prove that every kind of release was carried the same way in both years. Distinct companies are counted by the first ticker on each release. The quarterly series starts in 2021, because StockTitan’s database was still filling up during 2020.

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The information provided in this article is for educational and informational purposes only. It does not constitute financial advice, investment recommendation, or an endorsement of any particular investment strategy. Past performance does not guarantee future results. Investors should conduct their own research and consult with a qualified financial advisor before making investment decisions.

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