Some banks are quicker at adding up their revenues than others. The US banks invariably publish their results first , while the rest follow on in their own sweet time: Barclays and HSBC figures won’t be out until November 9 and 10 respectively. This week, though, we have the two big Swiss firms and the leader of the Euromoney FX survey for the last six years, Deutsche.
Credit Suisse summed up the quiet summer: “Most of our businesses were adversely impacted by a decline in client trading volumes that was exacerbated by a seasonal slow down. Results reflected a particularly weak July, a seasonally slow August and some improvement in September.”
Credit Suisse’s FICC numbers look solid enough: CHF1.458 billion ($1.475 billion) for Q3 compared with CHF1.438 billion for Q2. However, the results are way down on the excellent Q3 2009 number of CHF2.476 billion. There is no breakdown for performance in FX, except for the uninformative: “We had solid results in global rates and emerging markets.”
UBS FICC revenues suffered a near-50% decline over Q2 to CHF869 million from CHF1.703 billion. Again, unlike Credit Suisse, the result doesn’t look too bad compared with Q3 2009, when it reported revenue of CHF985 million.