Share count
318Mpeak FY2016
← All companies ← GRPN Manual GSAT → ← GREEL Capital Markets & Asset Management GSIW →
GS, Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (The)
Capital Markets & Asset Management financial
Goldman Sachs is a global investment bank. It advises corporations, financial institutions, governments and individuals on raising money, buying and selling companies, and managing their assets, and it makes markets in securities for clients. It earns fees for advice and for managing money, and it earns spreads and trading gains in the markets — money made by moving other people's money.
We manage and report our activities in three business segments: Global Banking & Markets, Asset & Wealth Management and Platform Solutions.
Substantially all of the revenues in Platform Solutions are from activities related to issuing credit cards to and raising deposits from Apple Card customers and related to businesses that have been exited.
The business
What it sells, where the money comes from, the kind of company it is.
Revenue · FY2025
$58.3B
+8.9% YoY · 6% 5-yr CAGR
Vital signs · TTM, with 5-yr average
Revenue $60.4B 5-yr avg $53.0B
Revenue $17.2B +14.4% vs yr-ago qtr
Net income $5.4B yr-ago $4.6B
Net margin 31.4% yr-ago 30.4%
The business in brief
read the 10-K →What this business is and what moves its needle, from its own SEC filings.
- What moves the needle
- The test for a bank like this is whether reputation, relationships and scale amount to a real franchise, or whether the work is a commodity sold on price; the filing itself names pricing pressure from rivals in investment banking, market-making and wealth management, so watch the fee and spread economics for an answer. The deeper levers are funding and trust: the firm runs on borrowed money and on the confidence of counterparties, so cost of funding, leverage, and the refinancing terms of its secured funding govern the downside as much as deal flow does. Regulators set the capital it must hold and the pay it may offer, and litigation and regulatory provisions are a recurring cost of the trade — the bad case is a market that freezes while leverage and legal bills stay. Watch return on capital across a full cycle, and the funding and litigation lines, in the record below.
- Is it a good business?
- Return on equity has sat below the cost of equity (median 10%, above 12% in only 2 of 10 years). It runs at a 64% efficiency ratio, about average. The cycle and the loan book decide this one; weigh the recession years in the record, not the average, and read the 10-K.
Drafted from the company's filings and reviewed by hand; every number is shown in full in the sections below.
The record
Ten years of arithmetic, read across the cycle.
The record, 2016–2025
realized figures from each filing · older years to the left| 2016’16 | 2017’17 | 2018’18 | 2019’19 | 2020’20 | 2021’21 | 2022’22 | 2023’23 | 2024’24 | 2025’25 | TTMTTMMar 2026 | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Income statement | |||||||||||
| $30.8B | $32.7B | $36.6B | $36.5B | $44.6B | $59.3B | $47.4B | $46.3B | $53.5B | $58.3B | $60.4B | RevenueRevenue |
| $2.6B | $2.9B | $3.8B | $4.4B | $4.8B | $6.5B | $7.7B | $6.4B | $8.1B | $13.6B | $14.2B | Net interest incomeNet int. |
| $28.2B | $29.8B | $32.8B | $32.2B | $39.8B | $52.9B | $39.7B | $39.9B | $45.5B | $44.7B | $46.2B | Noninterest incomeFee inc. |
| $182M | $657M | $674M | $1.1B | $3.1B | $357M | $2.7B | $1.0B | $1.3B | ($1.1B) | ($1.1B) | Credit-loss provisionProvision |
| $7.4B | $4.3B | $10.5B | $8.5B | $9.5B | $21.6B | $11.3B | $8.5B | $14.3B | $17.2B | $18.1B | Net incomeNet inc. |
| 28% | — | 16% | 20% | 24% | 20% | 16% | 21% | 22% | 21% | 20% | Effective tax rateTax rate |
| Cash flow & returns | |||||||||||
| 0.9% | 0.5% | 1.1% | 0.9% | 0.8% | 1.5% | 0.8% | 0.5% | 0.9% | 0.9% | 0.9% | Return on assetsROA |
| 9% | 5% | 12% | 9% | 10% | 20% | 10% | 7% | 12% | 14% | 15% | Return on equityROE |
| 7% | 3% | 10% | 7% | 7% | 17% | 6% | 4% | 8% | 10% | 10% | Retained to equityRetained/eq |
| 9% | 5% | 12% | 10% | 10% | 21% | 10% | 8% | 12% | 15% | 16% | Return on tangible equityROTCE |
| 66% | 64% | 64% | 68% | 65% | 54% | 66% | 75% | 63% | 64% | 64% | Efficiency ratioEffic. |
| Balance sheet | |||||||||||
| $860.2B | $916.8B | $931.8B | $993.0B | $1.16T | $1.46T | $1.44T | $1.64T | $1.68T | $1.81T | $2.06T | Total assetsAssets |
| $124.1B | $138.6B | $158.3B | $190.0B | $260.0B | $364.2B | $386.7B | $428.4B | $433.0B | $501.4B | $561.3B | DepositsDeposits |
| $3.7B | $3.7B | $3.8B | $4.2B | $4.3B | $4.3B | $6.4B | $5.9B | $5.9B | $5.9B | $6.6B | GoodwillGoodwill |
| $86.9B | $82.2B | $90.2B | $90.3B | $95.9B | $109.9B | $117.2B | $116.9B | $122.0B | $125.0B | $122.8B | Shareholders’ equityEquity |
| Per share | |||||||||||
| 435M | 409M | 390M | 376M | 360M | 356M | 358M | 346M | 334M | 318M | 308M | Shares out (diluted)Shares |
| $17.00 | $10.48 | $26.80 | $22.55 | $26.25 | $60.81 | $31.45 | $24.63 | $42.79 | $54.08 | $58.66 | EPS (diluted)EPS |
| $3.92 | $4.32 | $4.64 | $5.60 | $6.48 | $7.66 | $10.28 | $12.11 | $13.48 | $16.62 | $18.67 | Dividends / shareDiv/sh |
| $199.71 | $201.03 | $231.13 | $240.39 | $266.26 | $308.95 | $327.25 | $338.07 | $365.70 | $393.49 | $398.64 | Book value / shareBVPS |
| $190.30 | $191.16 | $220.66 | $227.50 | $252.48 | $295.74 | $303.84 | $317.56 | $345.61 | $372.11 | $374.22 | Tangible book / shareTBVPS |
Per-share growththe realized rate an owner's share compounded
| 9-yr | 5-yr | |
|---|---|---|
| Revenue / share | +11.2%/yr | +8.2%/yr |
| EPS | +13.7%/yr | +15.6%/yr |
| Dividends / share | +17.4%/yr | +20.7%/yr |
| Capital spending / share | −0.1%/yr | −18.0%/yr |
| Book value / share | +7.8%/yr | +8.1%/yr |
The record, charted
FY2016–2025Each measure over its full record; the current point and the worst year marked.
Revenue
$58.3Blow FY2016
Quality & stewardship
Returns, the balance sheet, capital allocation, and pay.
Owner’s Scorecard
FY2025 10-K · source on SEC EDGAR →
Is it a good business?
- Return on equity 14%StrongNet income $17.2B ÷ equity $125.0BIndustry peers: median 12%
What this means
The bank's north star, what it earns on shareholders' capital. Cost of equity is roughly 10%, so a return durably above that builds value and below it destroys it. One year is noisy; the durability across a full credit cycle is what counts.
- SolidNet income ÷ (equity − goodwill $5.9B − intangibles $842M)Industry peers: median 18%
What this means
The cleaner return, stripping out the goodwill paid for past acquisitions. This is the number a buyer of the whole bank actually earns on the hard capital.
- Efficiency ratio 64%Efficient (<65%)Noninterest expense $37.5B ÷ (net interest income + fees)
What this means
The share of revenue eaten by running costs; lower is better, and below about 60% marks a genuinely efficient operation. A low ratio held for years is the operational side of a moat.
Is it sound?
- Capital (equity / assets) 6.9%ModestEquity $125.0B ÷ assets $1.81T
What this means
A plain-English leverage read: how much of the balance sheet is the owners' own money. This is a rough proxy; the regulatory figure is the CET1 ratio, which is risk-weighted and reported in the filing. The point is the same, how much loss the bank can absorb before depositors are at risk.
- Deposit funding 28%Leans on wholesale fundingDeposits $501.4B ÷ assets $1.81T
What this means
Low-cost, sticky deposits are a bank's real moat, the cheap raw material it lends out at a spread. A bank funded mostly by deposits earns more durably than one that rents its money in the wholesale market.
- Credit cost (provision / NII) -8%Net reserve releaseProvision for credit losses ($1.1B) ÷ net interest income $13.6B
What this means
What the bank set aside this year against loans going bad, as a share of its lending income. This swings hard with the cycle, low in good years and spiking in recessions, so read it across the record, not in one year. Disciplined underwriting shows up as low, stable provisions through a downturn.
Does AI threaten the moat?
Moderate contestabilityAI is likely to reshape costs and some products here without clearly contesting or sparing the core moat; how the company itself frames it is the tell.
In its own filing Named as a competitive risk
Its FY2025 10-K names artificial intelligence as a competitive threat.
“The growth of electronic trading and the introduction of new products and technologies, including trading and distributed ledger technologies, such as cryptocurrencies, and AI technologies, has increased competition.”
The question is whether a moat the record shows as durable outlasts a technology that lowers the cost of part of what the firm sells. The durability is read in the record above, the filing's own framing of AI beside it; the industry label decides nothing on its own.
Read from the filing's own risk factors, paired with the industry's structure under its SIC code; the durability is read above, the price below.
All figures as filed; the source filing is linked above.
Debt maturity
the debt note, SEC EDGAR →Not how much it owes, but when it falls due, and against what. The ladder the company files, beside cash on hand and a year's owner earnings.
Bars scaled to the largest single year; “later” is everything due after 2030, shown apart since it dwarfs the years.
Due in the next 12 months$24.3Bthe first rung: what must be repaid or rolled over within the year
Within two years$49.7Bthe near wall, the part most exposed to today’s credit conditions
Biggest single year$25.4Bin 2028the lumpiest maturity, where a refinancing, if needed, is largest
Total scheduled principal$189.6Bevery year plus what lies beyond, as the footnote totals it
Against what the business has and earns
Cash & short-term investments, Mar 31, 2026$179.5B
Together, against $24.3B due next year7.4×
Cash on hand as of Mar 31, 2026 comes to $179.5B against the $24.3B due in the twelve months after the Dec 31, 2025 schedule: 7.4 times it.
Maturity schedule extracted from the company’s Dec 31, 2025 annual report and reconciled to the total the table states.
Management, ownership & pay
read the proxy →From the proxy: how much of the business the people running it own, and how they are paid, beside what the business earned for its owners in the same years.
| Fiscal year | Chief executive | Pay, as filed | “Actually paid” | Owner earnings |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2021 | Mr. Solomon | $40.7M | $97.4M | $4.3B |
| 2022 | Mr. Solomon | $32.2M | $27.3M | $6.3B |
| 2023 | Mr. Solomon | $27.0M | $12.7M | ($14.9B) |
| 2024 | Mr. Solomon | $31.3M | $120.0M | ($15.3B) |
| 2025 | Mr. Solomon | $118.9M | $309.8M | ($47.2B) |
Both pay figures are the company’s own, from the pay-versus-performance table its proxy statement files. “As filed” is the Summary Compensation Table total: salary, bonus, and equity awards at their value on the day of grant. “Actually paid” is the SEC’s prescribed recalculation, which re-marks those equity awards to what they became as they vested; it can swing far above or below the filed figure in either direction, and negative years occur. Owner earnings are the whole business's, from the record above, for the same fiscal years.
- Stock-based compensation$3.4B
The slice of the business handed to employees in shares this year, 6% of revenue, equal to 4% of operating profit. Buffett's oldest accounting fight: this is compensation, compensation is an expense, real whether or not the headline earnings admit it. One trap: the cash-flow statement adds SBC back, so the operating cash, and the owner earnings drawn from it, are flattered by exactly this amount; counted as the cost it is, what an owner keeps is lower.
Peers, Capital Markets & Asset Management
The same industry, side by side on the bank lens. Each figure is a through-cycle median, so a peak or trough year can’t distort it; the group median at the foot is the line to read each against.
| Company | Revenue | ROE | ROTCE | Efficiency | NII / assets |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| MSMorgan Stanley | $70.6B | 11% | 13% | 72% | 0.6% |
| GSGoldman Sachs Group Inc. (The) | $58.3B | 10% | 10% | 65% | 0.4% |
| SCHWCharles Schwab Corporation (The) | $23.9B | 13% | 18% | — | 1.9% |
| RJFRaymond James Financial Inc. | $15.9B | 16% | 18% | 82% | 2.1% |
| SFStifel Financial | $6.3B | 12% | 17% | — | — |
| FRHCFreedom Holding Corp. | $2.2B | 17% | 18% | — | 1.5% |
| OPYOppenheimer Holdings Inc. | $1.6B | 7% | 9% | — | — |
| Group median | — | 12% | 17% | 72% | 1.5% |
The price
What a price has to assume.
What the price implies
price / tangible bookA bank is worth a multiple of its tangible book value, and the multiple it deserves is set by the return it earns on that book. Type today’s price; we show what you would be paying against what Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (The)’s record justifies.
$
The assumptions
Tangible book / share, delivered7%/yr’20→’25
The justified multiple is (return on tangible equity − growth) ÷ (cost of equity − growth). A bank earning exactly its cost of equity is worth about one times tangible book; the premium above that prices each point of durable excess return. A higher cost of equity lowers the justified multiple for a bank.
Enter a price above to run it.
Price / tangible book—
Justified by the return—
Normalized return on tangible equity10%
Price / book—
Earnings yield—
P/E (3-yr avg ’23–’25)—
Graham’s price gate—
Graham applied the same standards to financial enterprises (Intelligent Investor ch.14): the 15× multiple cap on averaged earnings, and P/E times price-to-book at most 22.5. The gate marks the bargain-hunter’s floor, not a verdict.
A dated snapshot of the price you typed, the assumptions you set, and what the page showed for them. A snapshot is never edited after it is saved. Your notebook is yours alone — the commitment states what is stored and what we will never do.
Tangible book $115.3B on 295M shares, a 10% normalized return on it. The dials set the multiple such a return would justify; your price sets the multiple you are paying. It assumes the bank keeps earning that return; a credit cycle, a rate shock or a bad acquisition changes it, which is what the record and the 10-K are for.
Cite: Owner Scorecard, "Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (The) (GS), the owner's record," https://ownerscorecard.com/c/GS, data as of 2026-07-09.
Manual order: ← GRPN its page in the Manual GSAT →
Industry order: ← GREEL the Capital Markets & Asset Management chapter GSIW →