A weak Tuesday for big bank stocks.

On the surface, it seems like it should have been a good day for the bankers. After all, US regulators unveiled plans to propose new capital requirements half as burdensome as their original plan. But big bank executives delivered mostly tempered and cautionary comments around the uncertainty of earnings going forward at a New York conference hosted by Barclays on Monday and Tuesday.

JPMorgan Chase (JPM), Bank of America (BAC), Citigroup (C), and Goldman Sachs (GS) stocks all fell Tuesday, though the selling pressure eased by the mid-afternoon. (Year to date, those big bank stocks have rallied more than 12%. See chart below.)

Here are some highlights from the Barclays gathering:

Bank of America

Investment banking fees will be “basically flattish” from the year-ago period, while trading is expected to be “up low single digits” for the same period, CEO Brian Moynihan said Tuesday afternoon.

Net interest income, the crucial lending metric that pulls in the bulk of revenue for the country’s second-largest bank, “troughed” in the second quarter and is expected to rebound going forward.

“We're off the floor and growing,” said Moynihan.

In recent weeks, the bank has also been grappling with one of its largest investors, financial giant Berkshire Hathaway (BRK-A, BRK-B), selling roughly 174 million of the bank's shares since mid-July. As of its latest SEC filing late Tuesday, Berkshire has reduced its stake in the bank down to 11% and recognized $7 billion in gains on those sales.

“I don't know what exactly [Berkshire CEO Warren Buffett is] doing, because frankly, we can't ask him,” said Moynihan. "But he's been a great investor for our company and stabilized our company when we needed it at the time."

JPMorgan Chase

The country’s biggest bank is on pace to hit all its targets for net interest income and expenses this year, but analysts are “a bit too optimistic” about how much it will earn in 2025, the bank’s COO Daniel Pinto said Tuesday.

JPMorgan’s stock fell as much as 6.8%, its biggest intraday drop since June 2020. Pinto’s comments follow those echoed by CEO Jamie Dimon and CFO Jeremy Barnum that the bank has been over-earning in recent quarters.

Goldman Sachs

CEO David Solomon said Monday that trading revenue is expected to fall 10% in the third quarter from a year ago. He also cautioned that the firm will take a $400 million hit to pre-tax earnings from its credit card partnership with GM, which the bank has been trying to offload as part of a final retrenchment in its consumer business. Solomon did not share Goldman’s expectations for investment banking fees. The firm's profits roared back over the first half of 2024 thanks to a healthy rebound in dealmaking activity.

"I feel very good about the way the firm's positioned," Solomon said.

Citigroup

Credit costs are expected to rise by $200 million from the second quarter, CFO Mark Mason said Monday. Trading revenue in the third quarter from the bank’s market’s division is anticipated to be “down roughly 4% year over year,” driven in part by bond market volatility over the last month. The good news: Investment banking is likely “up 20% year over year," marking four consecutive quarters of growth in that business.

Meanwhile, Citi and its big bank peers — and their investors — are also digesting plans to revise new capital requirements that regulators unveiled Tuesday morning.

Though the new proposal cuts the increase for big banks by half from the original plan drafted more than a year ago, it would still raise the capital levels of these lenders by 9% in aggregate. (Though it will likely vary between banks based on their risk profiles.)

“There's an old phrase, show them death and they'll take despair, I sometimes feel that that's what we just got,” Bank of America’s Moynihan said. “They showed us 20[%] and, you know, they’re saying, take 10[%],” he added.

David Hollerith is a senior reporter for Yahoo Finance covering banking, crypto, and other areas in finance.

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