Goldman Sachs made $18.1 billion, or 53% of its revenue, from sales and trading in 2012, the company said today in its annual report. And it posted losses from trading on just 15 days last year, its best performance since the bank started disclosing that number in 2004. The distribution of Goldman’s daily trading profit is in the chart above.
The company also disclosed its daily “value at risk” (VaR), an oft-criticized measure of how much money the firm stood to lose from trading at any time last year. As you can see in the chart below, someone was feeling lucky late in the third quarter, and Goldman cleaned up its trading positions just before the year ended.
