Wall Street Just Booked $45.9B in Half a Year. Now Dealmakers Are Tracking 30% Bonus Pops — and the $90B Path Has a Catch

New York State Comptroller Thomas P. DiNapoli released the Securities Industry in New York City report on Oct. 6, 2026, and the headline number cleared the bar: U.S. broker-dealer profits at NYSE member firms totaled $45.9 billion in the first half of 2026, up 51.3% from a year ago. The run-rate already smashes New York City's own pre-year forecast of $45.3 billion for all of 2026 — a figure DiNapoli's office had issued just five months earlier. If the second half merely holds the first-half line, full-year profits exceed $90 billion, eclipsing the prior record of $65.1 billion set in 2025.

Drivers cited in the report: robust trading in stocks, bonds and currencies; supervisory and asset-management fees; a sharp acceleration in equity underwriting; and a long-awaited pickup in mergers and acquisitions. The Comptroller's office also called out AI-related venture investing, which printed $40.7 billion in the first half — already more than 50% above the full-year 2025 total of $26.4 billion — as a leading indicator for the underwriting pipeline. New York City tax collections from the securities industry rose 15.8% in fiscal 2026 versus the prior year.

The Q2 2026 earnings cycle (reported in mid-July) is what put the H1 print on the map. Global investment-banking revenue hit $61.4 billion in the first six months of the year, up 24% from a year earlier, and the big U.S. banks posted some of their sharpest single-quarter profit jumps in years.

Goldman Sachs's Global Banking & Markets segment laid out the underlying mix in its July 14, 2026 earnings release: Q2 investment-banking fees of $3.40 billion (+55% YoY), FICC of $4.59 billion (+32%), and equities of $7.42 billion (+72%) — the latter a record. The firm delivered diluted EPS of $20.98, an annualized return on common equity of 23.5%, and net revenues of $20.3 billion. Within investment banking, the lift came specifically from equity underwriting (secondaries and IPOs) and leveraged-finance and ABS debt underwriting. Equities intermediation jumped 60% on stronger derivatives and cash activity, and FICC intermediation gained on interest-rate products and commodities.

Compensation consultancy Johnson Associates revised its 2026 bonus forecast upward in August 2026, lifting projections by an average of three percentage points across 21 job categories. Four out of five Wall Street job categories are now projected to see bonuses grow versus 2025. The compensation data lines up tightly with the profit distribution: the categories most levered to trading and capital-markets activity are getting the biggest bumps, while private markets face a more uneven picture.

The 2025 baseline was already at a record: the bonus pool reached $49.2 billion (+9% YoY) and the average bonus climbed6% to $246,900, per DiNapoli's March 2026 report. A double-digit percentage increase on that base would push the 2026 pool above the $54 billion mark — fresh records across the distribution, even before applying the top-tier dealmaker skew that Johnson flagged. The Comptroller separately noted that average Wall Street salaries in New York City jumped 11.1% to $561,770 in 2025, a base effect that compounds with the bonus pool increase.

The $90 billion profit trajectory flows outward through three identifiable second-order channels. The first is independent advisory: when global M&A volumes exceed $3 trillion and ECM/IPO fees compound, pure-play M&A shops take a measurable share. Evercore posted Q2 2026 revenue of $998 million, with TTM revenue of $4.74 billion; Lazard sits in the same bracket with the same exposure. Second is alternative-asset management: deal flow drives realizations, fundraising, and secondary-market activity — the categories Johnson says are paying +5% to +10% in bonuses. Third is the New York City real-estate complex, where bonus money historically reprices the luxury segment within12 months.

Wealth management — the segment where Morgan Stanley and Bank of America concentrate their retail-bank-plus-advice footprints — sits in Johnson's \"+5% wealth\" bucket but, in dollar terms, anchors the largest non-takeaway employee group on the Street. Johnson also flagged that \"the advantage alternative asset management firms had has fully gone away\" — meaning the spread between bulge-bracket banks and alternatives shops on bonus growth has narrowed meaningfully. That convergence benefits diversified franchises like Morgan Stanley and asset-light franchises like Evercore, both of which saw double-digit net-income growth in Q2.

DiNapoli's own report flagged the fragility. The 10-year Treasury yield hit 5.35% — the highest since 2002 — and the Comptroller explicitly tied it to the dealmaking and IPO outlook. Higher long rates compress equity multiples, lengthen the gap between buyer and seller valuation expectations, and raise the cost of leveraged-finance underwriting. The same dynamic sits behind the Johnson Associates caveat that \"projections are fragile given macro factors,\" with geopolitical problems and stress in private credit potentially slowing the cycle.

The same rate regime is the reason private credit — the one category Johnson explicitly cuts — faces a 10% bonus decline. NAV marks, redemption queues, and a slower deployment cycle are the proximate drivers. The asymmetry is informative: it tells you where the H1 boom is most rate-sensitive (equities trading, IPO underwriting, leveraged finance) and where the risk is already discounting into comp (private credit). Banks with the largest trading books (Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase) have the most upside if volatility persists and the most downside if the deal pipeline slows. Diversified wealth-and-asset-management businesses (Morgan Stanley, Bank of America) have a flatter profile — positive in either rate regime, but with lower upside in the boom scenario.

Near term (days–quarters), the Q3 2026 earnings cycle in mid-October is the first test of the $90B trajectory — bankers have already telegraphed that Q3 trading revenue will be \"better than normal, but not to match the big gains earlier in the year,\" per The Wall Street Journal. If Q3 holds roughly the Q2 trading run-rate, the H2 path tracks comfortably above $90B. The Anthropic IPO timing (reportedly targeted for late 2026 into early 2027) is the most-watched single catalyst for the underwriting line.

Long term (1–3 years), the question is whether AI-driven issuance becomes a structural pipeline. AI-related VC spending hit $40.7 billion in H1 2026 — already 50% above the full-year 2025 total — and a successful Anthropic listing at a reported $2 trillion valuation would reset the underwriting benchmark for the next cycle. The structural risk is also structural: a 5.35% 10-year yield that persists for another 12–18 months would reprice both M&A multiples and the IPO discount, pulling the 2027 baseline down toward $70B rather than compounding the $90B. The asymmetry favors traders over dealers and diversified banks over pure-play M&A advisors over the next two-year window.