Goldman Traders Had Most Losing Days in Seven Years Last Quarter

(Bloomberg) -- The end of 2018 proved to be a rough one for Wall Street. Goldman Sachs Group Inc. just showed how bad it got.

The bank’s traders posted losses on at least 19 days in the last quarter of the year, including a day where losses approached almost $100 million, according to its annual regulatory disclosure. It was the worst showing for the bank by that measure since 2011, according to filing data reviewed by Bloomberg.

Goldman Sachs’s fixed-income traders posted the lowest revenue since the financial crisis in the fourth quarter and new Chief Executive Officer David Solomon is carrying out a review of the trading business. The bank’s executives have proposed plans to trim the fixed-income trading unit, people with knowledge of the matter have said. That would likely include personnel cuts as well as a reduction in the capital dedicated to its core trading business within the fixed-income group, the people said.

By the end of the year, Goldman had logged a month’s worth of loss-making days. That figure climbed sharply through the volatile end to the year, after the firm’s traders posted just 12 days of losses in the first nine months of 2018.

At least two of the daily losses exceeded what Goldman’s value-at-risk estimate would expect on 95 percent of days, the firm said in its filing. Still, the bank had days of big gains too, including 12 days in the year when traders pocketed more than $100 million for the firm.

To contact the reporters on this story: Sridhar Natarajan in New York at snatarajan15@bloomberg.net;Brandon Kochkodin in New York at bkochkodin@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Michael J. Moore at mmoore55@bloomberg.net, Steve Dickson

©2019 Bloomberg L.P.