New York, January 7, 2026, 13:52 (EST) — Regular session
- Goldman Sachs shares fell as big banks stepped back after a three-session run
- Traders are weighing fresh U.S. labour data ahead of Friday’s payrolls report
- Attention is shifting to bank earnings next week, including Goldman on Jan. 15
Shares of The Goldman Sachs Group Inc (GS.N) fell 1.3% to $942.97 in midday New York trading on Wednesday. The stock opened at $956.88 and swung between $942.00 and $959.68, with about 1.2 million shares traded.
Bank stocks slid after a three-session rally as investors digested weaker-than-expected U.S. job openings and a softer ADP private payrolls report. Bank of America was down about 2% and JPMorgan slipped after Wolfe Research cut it to “peer perform”; “The economic news sort of fueled a little bit of profit taking,” said Dakota Wealth’s Robert Pavlik. Traders now turn to Friday’s U.S. nonfarm payrolls report for December. 1
Next week brings a run of big-bank results, with JPMorgan set to report on Jan. 13 and Goldman and Morgan Stanley due on Jan. 15. Analysts expect a jump in investment banking revenue as dealmaking picked up, with global investment banking revenue rising 15% to nearly $103 billion and mergers and acquisitions volume climbing 42% to $5.1 trillion in 2025, Dealogic data showed. For Goldman, analysts expect earnings per share — a key profit measure — to fall about 4.9%, with Wells Fargo analysts pointing to softer private-banking net interest income, the spread between what a bank earns on loans and pays on deposits, and higher compensation costs. 2
A day earlier, Goldman got a public reminder of where it still dominates. LSEG data showed the bank led global M&A league tables in 2025, advising on $1.48 trillion of deals and earning $4.6 billion in M&A fees. “It was an extraordinary M&A market,” Goldman’s global co-head of M&A, Stephan Feldgoise, said in the bank’s 2026 M&A outlook. 3
Goldman also told clients this week that hedge-fund risk-taking stayed hot into year-end. In a prime brokerage note, the bank said stock-picking hedge funds returned 16.24% in 2025 and that gross leverage in its prime book rose to 292.8% in December — roughly $300 of long and short positions for every $100 of investor capital. 4
The backdrop is not clean. A Reuters columnist flagged lofty U.S. equity valuations as a pressure point for 2026, arguing they can leave markets more vulnerable to drawdowns that tend to chill deal flow and weigh on fee-heavy businesses. 5
In Goldman’s results, investors are likely to focus on whether advisory and underwriting momentum translates into fees, and how trading holds up after a strong run in markets. They will also watch expense discipline — especially compensation — and signs of client appetite in wealth and private banking.
Before that, Friday’s payrolls report will test the rate-cut narrative that has helped lift risk assets early in the year. Goldman’s next major catalyst is its Jan. 15 earnings report.
