Best Damn Rankings Period

Want to know the best way to rank the banks? How about asking the incredibly obvious question "Who makes the most money?" instead of looking at the league tables and talking about "prestige"...

This is how those rankings would shake out (all NI ttm):

  1. JPMorgan Chase & Co.: 14.30B
  2. The Goldman Sachs Group, Inc.: 11.55B
  3. Deutsche Bank AG: 7.72B
  4. Credit Suisse Group: 6.32B
  5. Barclays PLC: 5.16B
  6. UBS AG: 5.08B
  7. Morgan Stanley: 3.39B
  8. Lazard: (0.95B)
  9. Bank of America Corporation: (2.00B)
  10. Citigroup, Inc.: (3.90B)

Can this please be the last "rank the bulge brackets" thread for the next 24 hours? They're all the same except for Goldman and that's just common knowledge.

21 Comments
 
Best Response

yeah but these are not pure comps of each other. some of these banks have huge commercial/retail banking arms. and thus your comparable analysis is flawed, in my opinion.

people on this site come to talk about investment banks, not retail banks. and chase, citibank, bofa, contribute a lot to the revenues of each of the firms listed above. yet this site's audience is not interested in retail banking, so applying a heavy weight to a meaningless attribute ensures that your list is incorrect for this audience.

now go grab me a bagel downstairs.

 
southernbelleyeah but these are not pure comps of each other. some of these banks have huge commercial/retail banking arms. and thus your comparable analysis is flawed, in my opinion.

people on this site come to talk about investment banks, not retail banks. and chase, citibank, bofa, contribute a lot to the revenues of each of the firms listed above. yet this site's audience is not interested in retail banking, so applying a heavy weight to a meaningless attribute ensures that your list is incorrect for this audience.

now go grab me a bagel downstairs.

It's called satire, dear. Do you want coffee with that?
 

Yeah, but those ALL have the same exit opportunities, trust me. The exit opportunity is YOU, much more than which firm of the above you worked at. Period, end of this.

 
RadarBankerYeah, but those ALL have the same exit opportunities, trust me. The exit opportunity is YOU, much more than which firm of the above you worked at. Period, end of this.

Finally a guy with some sense to tell it like it is. Truer words have never been spoken

 

Rankings don't matter. What matters is how well you do your job and whether you like the people you work with. It's better to work at a rock quarry with folks you enjoy working with than work at a top-five firm with folks you hate. Life is short and money and prestige aren't worth spending the best years of your life working with people you hate at a job you hate.

 

How is it possible to be have negative revenue?

And where do these numbers come from?

 
eyelikecheeseHow is it possible to be have negative revenue?

And where do these numbers come from?

Few different ways, but it's very uncommon - especially for financial institutions:

http://www.revenuerecognition.com/content/experts/9011.asp

The numbers come from CapIQ. By the way, I'm still smiling at how someone deemed DontMakeMeShortYou worthy of a banana for a.) getting promptly owned by RadarBanker and b.) having the attention to detail to confuse revenue and income.

 

My apologies. I didn't notice the NI. But why is the NI relevant to investment banking division? Or is this the whole banks operation?

 
boutiquebank4lifeYou're an idiot nohomo and I don't say that often.
If you can't see through the fact that I'm a.) joking around, b.) getting sidekickz/jimbojones to out himself and c.) making a pretty solid point about how banks can't function if they continuously operate unprofitably (the very basis a lot of people on this board use to critique places), you must be really dense.
 

Sidekikz is a true TROLL

All your posts are TROLL posts

Why do you waste time and bash UBS

I can guarantee, KKR or Harvard don't really care whether you worked at Goldman or UBS or Lazard

They care about the whole package and people like you, even if you slipped through the cracks at a decent firm, will never ultimately be successful

SIDEKIKZ IS A TROLLLLLLLLLL

PS EYELIKECHEEZE IS A SOLID POSTER, KEEP IT UP MAN

 

These are just ridiculous to begin with. Worked at a top tier BB. There are tons of banks, and odds are if it is a name you've heard of or appears on ANY of these lists, it is likely a pretty good firm.

 

Well I don't think it's a matter of unprofitability, as evidenced by the income statement, but the cash actually coming in and going out. Maybe over a span of a few years, but banks have so many loopholes they exploit in the accounting codes, as well as write-offs, impairments, loan loss reserves, and especially shedding of non-core assets which results in write downs( a la Citi's $800m and BoA $10.4ish mil. At some banks, different divisions are the reason they are still generating solid earnings.

Look at MS, gets killed by real estate holding, but has 25% stake in deontology partners and a SOLID institutional securities division but weak as hell trading. BoA is solid in Global Markets and commercial banking, but their consumer division, cards, and home loans are a drag on earnings. Citi has a nice retail presence, great deal flow with advisory fees and is herding its non-core assets like crazy. Their ROE is 1.3% in the US vs. Over 3% in LatAm

It's all in the details and divisions.

I appreciate the shout out likeminded. Some would see things otherwise

 

Good post again. As I tee these posts up, you're hitting them out of the park.

The problem I wanted to highlight (other than sidekickz) is that an incredibly small percentage of this forum's userbase has insight enough to say what you just said - to understand each bank's strengths and weaknesses, to understand how numbers are juiced, to look beyond a generic league table to see what a bank is and isn't good at, etc.

 

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