JPMorgan shares slide in face of 24% jump in Q3 profits

JPMorgan Chase kicked off Wall Street earnings season with a top-level bang.

The nation’s biggest bank saw its quarterly profits jump in the third quarter by 24% to $11.7 billion, or $3.74 per share, from the $9.4 billion, or $2.92 per share, that was reported a year ago—potentially providing a glimpse of what’s to come from other major financial institutions like Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley in the next few days.

Its results were helped along by a boom in investment banking activity that led the business to see revenues that were 45% higher from the year-ago period. JPMorgan also released $2.1 billion of reserves that had been stockpiled away at the outset of the pandemic in case of potential loan losses, as “the economic outlook continues to improve and our scenarios have improved accordingly,” chairman and CEO Jamie Dimon said in a statement.

Yet shares in JPMorgan slid Wednesday once the market opened. The stock was down about 2.3% as of 12 p.m. ET.

Total loans were up 6% across the company, driven in large part by its loans within its asset and wealth management business. And net interest income, a key metric for banks, rose 1% year over year to $13.2 billion. But JPMorgan did indicate that parts of its lending business were still seeing lagging growth in the third quarter.

Loans within its consumer and community banking unit, for instance, were down 2% year over year, which the bank attributed to higher mortgage prepayments and continued forgiveness to loans from the PPP program. Net revenues for JPMorgan’s consumer and community banking division fell 3% from the same period of 2020, though net income did jump 12%. Card average loans, meanwhile, were up about 1%, though CFO Jeremy Barnum told analysts that JPMorgan does believe that could be on the rise soon.

“We see some signs of life,” Barnum said on the bank’s Oct. 13 earnings conference call. “And we believe the recovery is strongly underway.”