In trading, BAML is now best, Morgan Stanley is worst, Goldman's not NEARLY as good as last year

If you want a perspective on how much harder it's become to make money out of trading, look no further than Goldman's latest 10Q, compared to its 10Q for the third quarter of 2009.

To make matters easier for you, we've juxtaposed the two of them below.

Goldman, daily net trading revenues 3Q10

Goldman, daily net trading revenues 3Q09

To spell it out: Goldman had 7 days when it made more than $100m in the last quarter, and 36 days when it made more than $100m in 3Q09.

As Zero Hedge points out, this is not a passing trend. Goldman will make a lot less from trading now that its prop activities have been curtailed.

Zero hedge also has the following graph, which helpfully aggregates Goldman's trading performance over the past three quarters. This shows that although it's become far more difficult to make money year-on-year, Q3 was at least better than Q2.

Source: ZeroHedge

Morgan Stanley and BAML

However hard things have got at Goldman, its traders can at least pride themselves that they're better than their colleagues at Morgan Stanley.

In the three months to September, Morgan Stanley's traders had their worst quarter since 2006. They only made >$100m on one day, and lost money on 10 days.

Morgan Stanley, daily net trading revenues 3Q10

Conversely, the best trading performance of the recent quarter appears to have occurred at BAML. The bank hasn't produced a 10Q filing with the details yet, but during its third quarter call it mentioned that it made money every single day. This does not appear to have been successfully replicated elsewhere.