JPMorgan increased pay in its investment bank. Here's who should get it

Q3 reporting season has begun. As usual, the American bulge brackets are opening the count, and JPMorgan today was first of them all. The bank did not do amazingly – it missed earnings expectations – but things were more complicated than they seem.

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For one, it wasn’t all doom and gloom. JPMorgan’s headcount was, both compared to a year ago and compared to three months ago. Pay was up too, and the bank is on track to increase average compensation for the year by around 10% compared to 2025.

One group that will definitely benefit is JPMorgan’s M&A bankers. The firm posted a 42% increase in M&A revenue for the first nine months of 2026 compared to 2025, ahead of Citi’s 3.4% up and Goldman’s 34% up.

Capital markets teams, both equity capital markets (ECM) and debt capital markets (DCM), were not quite as successful. DCM revenue was up just 5% in the same period, compared to Citi’s 17% up and Goldman’s 29% up.

ECM revenue was up by 42% in the first nine months of the year on the same period in 2025. That was well behind Goldman, which was up 73%, and Citi, which was up 86% in the same period. This was driven by a weak performance in Q3 – JPMorgan’s ECM revenue was up by 7% compared to the same period in 2025, but that was far behind both Citi and Goldman, which were up 77% and 43%, respectively.

JPMorgan’s sales and trading teams performed more averagely. Equities revenue, to start with, was up by 49%. That seems good. It was up more than at Citi, where equities revenue was up just 33%. It was also up less than Goldman’s 57%. JPMorgan credited its prime and derivatives teams in particular for the performance.

Fixed income, currencies, and commodities (FICC) revenue, which was up 7.8%, was also a mixed bag. The firm was almost on par with Citi (which was 8.1% up), and well ahead of Goldman (which was 5.8% up). That 9M performance was overwhelmingly driven by a strong Q1 and Q2 – JPMorgan posted a 4.4% decrease in revenue for Q3, compared to a 3.8% increase at Citi and a milder (0.6%) decrease at Goldman. 

The firm noted that revenue was lower in commodities, rates, credit and public finance, and only offset (positively) by currencies and emerging markets trading. The commodities failure was particularly poor; commodities have been having a bumper year due to instability in the middle east. Goldman even credited “significantly higher net revenues” in commodities as a driver behind its revenue.

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