Goldman Sachs Traders Lost Money on One Day in Quarter

Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (GS), the Wall Street bank that generated 57 percent of its first-quarter revenue from trading, had a loss from that business on one day in the period, down from 17 during the preceding three months.

The firm’s traders made more than $100 million on 24 of the 62 days in the quarter ended March 31, according to a quarterly regulatory filing today by the New York-based company. The quarter produced the fewest days of trading losses since the first quarter of 2011, the filing shows.

Goldman Sachs, the fifth-biggest U.S. bank by assets (GS), reported last month that revenue from trading stocks, bonds and other securities dropped 14 percent in the first quarter from a year earlier. That followed a 21 percent decline in trading revenue for 2011, the worst performance since 2008.

Morgan Stanley, the sixth-biggest U.S. bank, said this week that its traders lost money on four days during the first quarter, up from three a year earlier. Bank of America Corp., the No. 2 U.S. lender, reported last week that it had trading profits on every day in the period.

Trading losses never exceeded Goldman Sachs’s value-at-risk limit -- a measure of how much the company estimates it could lose in the securities markets in a single day -- during the quarter, according to the filing. Average daily value-at-risk dropped to $95 million in the three months ended March 31, from $135 million in the prior period, the firm reported on April 17.

To contact the reporter on this story: Christine Harper in New York at charper@bloomberg.net

To contact the editor responsible for this story: David Scheer at dscheer@bloomberg.net.