To say Goldman’s stock traders have had a good 2026 would be an understatement, and not a small one either.

Indeed, “good” is wholly insufficient as an adjective to describe the kind of year it’s been for the firm’s equities business. “Stupendous” might work. Or even “stupid,” as in: Ridiculously over the top.

In Q2, you might recall, the firm racked up a mind-bending $7.42 billion in equities-trading revenue. Q3 results released on Tuesday reflected another barnstorming performance. Specifically, revenue in equities was $6.44 billion for the period.

In addition to being up nearly 75% versus the same period in 2025, that was almost $1.5 billion ahead of consensus which, at better than $5 billion, was hardly subdued.

FICC slipped versus the same quarter a year ago. Revenue there was $3.47 billion. That was meaningfully below estimates, but as noted here while documenting JPMorgan’s quarter, FICC was expected to be weak across the Street for Q3.

In IB, Goldman ran up $3.22 billion. That was better than expected. Note from the figure below that the “slowdown” from Q2 was only marginal.

It’s fair, I reckon, to say an increasingly adverse rates environment and nascent concerns about the viability of AI-related IPOs and debt raises hasn’t really started to bite, although Goldman’s advisory backlog did decrease.

The icing on the cake: Incentive fees from lining up SpaceX wagers for clients were nearly $590 million at Goldman in Q3, up a cool 425% QoQ and 672% YoY.

If there were any remaining questions as to whether David Solomon’s got it figured it out (there weren’t), this quarter put them to rest. After squandering time, money and shareholder value on a silly mass-market consumer lark, Solomon remembered how the firm — where he’s spent more than a third of his life — actually works.

As I put it over the summer, running Goldman isn’t especially hard. The first (and arguably only) rule is to just let Goldman do what Goldman does. Anything else is New Coke.

“Against the backdrop of a complicated operating environment, our clients continued to turn to Goldman for our world-class advice, execution and financing capabilities,” Solomon said Tuesday, adding that 2026 is on track to be the firm’s best year ever.