Happy “Retail traders are still getting shafted Day” to all who celebrate… 

State Street, the quiet middleman behind half the planet’s ETFs, mutual funds, and “indexing geniuses”, just put on an absolute earnings clinic, beating estimates with EPS of $2.78 on $3.55 billion revenue, up 9% year-over-year. The Boston behemoth now guards $51.7 trillion in assets under custody and $5.4 trillion in AUM… a.k.a. numbers so large they stop being real and start sounding like w*t dreams for bean counters.

(Source: Giphy) 

In short, every ETF, pension, and “passive strategy” you brag about on LinkedIn? State Street’s the one quietly taking a rake off the top. Think of them like the Ace Rothstein of Wall Street… doesn’t play the hand, just counts the chips and keeps smiling. Case in point: Fee revenue rose 8%. Servicing fees climbed 7%, management fees jumped 16%, foreign-exchange trading up 11%, securities-finance up 19%. The only thing that didn’t moon was net-interest income, down 1%, because even $50 trillion under lock and key can’t out-alpha J-Powws mood swings.

(Source: Investing.com) 

As for margins, they stayed obscene. Pre-tax 31%, ROE 13.4%. The firm sent $637 million back to shareholders in the form of $400 million in buybacks, $237 million in dividends (while bumping the quarterly payout 11% to $0.84). Bigly. Translation: This is legitimately the definition of the quiet confidence you only get from knowing you’ll still get paid even if the entire S&P spontaneously combusts tomorrow.

Oh, and they also dropped 39 new investment products this quarter, presumably to make sure there’s an ETF tracking the number of ETFs launched. CEO Ron O’Hanley called it “disciplined execution.” That’s polite phrasing for what’s really happening: State Street is the fee-collecting embodiment of entropy. Money moves, it skims. Markets rise, it skims. Markets collapse, it still skims… because every panicked rebalance routes straight through their servers. 

(Source: Giphy) 

Meaning, it doesn’t matter who wins, who loses, or who rage-quits; the house logs in every morning and collects rent from your activity. So if you didn’t know who State Street was before this… you do now. And they just made earnings season it’s b*tch. Place your bets accordingly, friends. Until next time… 

At the time of publishing, Stocks.News does not hold position in companies mentioned in the article.