Goldman Sachs tops Wall Street for fourth quarter ECM revenue

Activity increased for a fourth consecutive year, with the volume of IPOs, share sales and convertible bonds rising to $841.8 billion

• Goldman Sachs led Q4 2025 equity underwriting revenue with $521 million.
• Medline's $7.2B IPO in 2025 was the largest, led by Goldman and Morgan Stanley.
• 2026 IPOs may surge, with major firms like SpaceX eyeing listings.

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Goldman Sachs Group Inc. returned to the top of Wall Street’s equity capital markets revenue leaderboard in the final quarter of last year, as banks jostle for roles on the blockbuster initial public offerings expected in 2026.

The New York-based firm reported $521 million of equity underwriting revenue in the final three months of 2025, beating Morgan Stanley’s $494 million and JPMorgan Chase & Co.’s $416 million over the same period.

Activity increased for a fourth consecutive year, with the volume of IPOs, share sales and convertible bonds rising to $841.8 billion, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. That’s still just more than half the record amount raised in 2021.

The figure isn’t likely to be eclipsed soon, according to Goldman’s Chief Executive Officer David Solomon.

“My guess would be that equity capital markets levels will still be meaningfully below the 2021 peak in 2026, but they will be higher than they were this year,” Solomon told analysts on the bank’s earnings call on Thursday.

The bank ended 2025 on a high with its leading role on Medline Inc.’s $7.2 billion listing, which is the year’s biggest IPO and the largest since Porsche AG’s debut in 2022. Including fees from the so-called over-allotment option, the 47 banks on Medline’s offering shared $156.5 million, according to its filings. More than a third went to Goldman and Morgan Stanley for leading the offering.

Even with some big IPOs in the US, Europe and India, and a hectic run of convertible bond sales, Goldman and Morgan Stanley were only able to eke out single-digit percentage point revenue gains compared to the fourth quarter of 2024.

For 2025 overall, Morgan Stanley was the top performer, lifting equity capital markets revenue by 23% to $1.97 billion.

“Equity issuance led by convertibles and IPOs remained strong, driving consistent results in equity underwriting,” Sharon Yeshaya, Morgan Stanley’s chief financial officer, told analysts on the banks’ earnings call Thursday.

Expectations are high that 2026 will represent a breakout year as some of the biggest private companies, led by SpaceX, consider going public as early as this year.

“We’ve got a lot of big, big companies in the pipe that I think just for a variety of reasons are reaching a moment in time where they’re saying, ‘you know what, it’s time to go,’” said Goldman’s Solomon, who also expects private equity firms to take more of their portfolio companies public.