This Financial Holding Signals Healthy Trend for Banking, Trading Volumes

This week and next we have several investor conferences being held, and with just over a month until we close the current quarter and get ready for the subsequent earnings season, the presentations being given will closely dissected.

Are the comments being made tracking management guidance from earlier in the quarter? Do they indicate a pick-up in business activity? And what is being said about the impact of the U.S.-Iran war and the closure of the Strait of Hormuz as those disruptions continue?

To those questions, we can add insights about AI adoption, layoffs, input costs, other inflation pressures and a handful of other items.

From a Pro Portfolio perspective, on Wednesday, Bank of America (BAC) presented at the Bernstein 42nd Annual Strategic Decisions Conference. Here is some of what CEO Brian Moynihan had to say:

“The customer lives their life and does their things. If the real impact on, if you look across the 30 years of this data, is when unemployment starts moving. If you watch new claims or something like that, and they start moving… Businesses are being careful, both large, medium, and small, on hiring and making sure they’re hiring carefully.“

“Five years ago, it was like Venmo’s going to eat your lunch, and now our Zelle payments exceed Venmo’s payments.

“I think if you look at us for this quarter , just to give you sort of an update, I’d say the NII, we told you what would happen the next day and stuff. We feel good about that. We moved the range of five to seven for the year up to six to eight. We feel good about that. You should expect this quarter , be good and solid on that. On investment banking and trading, we’re doing, I think, trading, think like a 15% increase year-over-year … Investment banking is in pretty good shape, and wealth management in the low teens year-over-year.“

Those are positive comments from Moynihan and they support our thesis on the shares. However, it was Moynihan’s final comment about “paying attention to the expense side” of things that stood out to us. BofA has been focused on keeping a lid on expenses, and per Moynihan the company should see 200 to 300 basis points of operating leverage this year. On the company’s Q1 2026 earnings call back in mid-April, Moynihan commented that operating leverage would be more than 200-basis points compared to 2025.

This afternoon, Axon (AXON) is presenting at the TD Cowen Technology, Media & Telecom conference and on Thursday, Applied Materials (AMAT) presents at the Bernstein Conference. We’ll continue to share not only what we learn but also other comments that stand out to us.

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At the time of publication, TheStreet Pro Portfolio was long AMAT, AXON and BAC shares.