While trading revenue tends to be the highest in the first quarter of the year, the largest banks in Europe and the US are already expecting trading to have plunged in the first three months of 2016 on the back of a slowdown in China, low commodity prices and low chances of a US rate rise, according to the Financial Times. However, in the US at least, 2015 was the best year for trading since 2011 and the first quarter of 2015 was the strongest performing three months since the first quarter of 2010.
The Office of the Comptroller of Currency (OCC) recently reported that the trading revenue of US commercial banks was $22.79bn in 2015, the best performance since 2011. The improvement over previous years was not large, because US banks earned $22.7bn from trading in 2014 and $22.08bn in the year before. By contrast, in 2011 the trading revenue was $25.28bn.