Goldman's Quarter Is Huge

Updated from 10:59 a.m.

Goldman Sachs(GS Quote), to no great surprise, breezed past Wall Street expectations with a 93% gain in fourth-quarter profit.

The big Wall Street investment firm posted big gains in fees from investment-banking work and trading revenue compared with a year ago.

But investment-banking revenue gains looked a bit weak compared with that of the third quarter of this year, which normally is a soft one for Wall Street firms. The firm's asset management business also took a pounding, compared to the third quarter, because of the poor performance of some of Goldman Sachs' hedge funds.

The quarter also was juiced by a big $949 million one-time gain on the IPO for a Chinese bank that Goldman Sachs had invested in.

In the fourth quarter, Goldman Sachs earned $3.15 billion, or $6.59 a share, compared with $1.63 billion, or $3.35 a share, a year ago. Net revenue rose 47% to $9.4 billion.

Analysts, as surveyed by Thomson Financial, were looking for earnings of $6 a share on revenue of $8.8 billion.

It's not uncommon for the analyst estimate of brokerage earnings to miss the mark by a wide margin because of the difficulty in predicting revenue from proprietary trading, which are trades made for a firm's own account.

Shares of Goldman Sachs most recently traded down 30 cents to $202.19. The stock most recently was down 2 cents to $202.50.

Later this week, Lehman Brothers(LEH Quote) and Bear Stearns(BSC Quote) also report fourth-quarter earnings.

Trading once again was the big revenue driver at Goldman Sachs. In the quarter, revenue from bond, currency and commodity trading rose 58% to $3.1 billion. Revenue from stock trading rose 105% to $1.23 billion.