Markets JPM JUL 15, 2026

JPMorgan Posts Record $6B Equities Haul as Cool CPI Meets Hormuz Blockade

JPM's Q2 equities revenue jumped 86% to $6.03 billion as June CPI landed at 3.5% — but a reinstated Iran blockade sent Brent above $85 and knocked Nvidia 3.5% lower.

BY HENLEY MARRAST · MARKETS DESK

JPMorgan Chase posted its highest quarterly profit ever on Tuesday, powered by an 86% year-on-year surge in equities-trading revenue to a record $6.03 billion, a print that beat the highest estimate in Bloomberg’s analyst survey and pushed total trading revenue to $12.1 billion. The desk cleared its own Q1 record one quarter after setting it. A $4.6 billion mark-up on the bank’s long-held Visa stake sweetened the arithmetic.

The tape is telling two stories at once, and JPM sits on both sides. June CPI cooled to 3.5% year-on-year, with core at 2.8%, still above the Fed’s 2% target but soft enough that Fed Chair Kevin Warsh told Congress “the inflation surge of the last five years will be a thing of the past.” Jamie Dimon, characteristically, framed the environment around “AI-driven capital investment, fiscal stimulus and the benefits of more efficient regulation,” a sentence engineered to be quoted in three different rooms.

Then Monday happened. President Trump reinstated the US blockade of Iranian ships transiting the Strait of Hormuz and demanded a 20% fee on all cargo passing through, a headline he later abandoned but not before Brent’s September contract ripped 9.6% to settle at $83.80, its biggest one-day gain in more than six years, briefly topping $85. US Central Command struck Iran for a third consecutive night.

Risk assets took the hit unevenly. The S&P 500 fell 0.8%, the Nasdaq 100 dropped 1.9%, semiconductors sank 4.8%, Nvidia lost 3.5%, and AppLovin cratered 12.7%. The VIX jumped 14.2% to 17.16.

Skyler Weinand, chief investment officer at Regan Capital, put the whipsaw plainly: “Tuesday’s weaker-than-expected CPI print suggests the inflation surge driven by the Iran war is fading, but this may just be a temporary relief as tensions have escalated in recent days.”

The structural read is straightforward. Volatility is the product JPMorgan sells, and Washington is manufacturing it wholesale. Add the SpaceX IPO, the largest listing in history, funneling underwriting fees to JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs, and Morgan Stanley, and the bulge-bracket earnings cycle looks less like a cyclical peak and more like a policy dividend.

Sources

About the author

Henley Marrast

MARKETS DESK

Henley Marrast covers AI-equity flow, accelerator demand, and earnings prints for AI Sheet Report. She leads coverage of the public AI complex from the New York markets desk, with a focus on the daily tape and quarterly results. She has been writing about technology markets for several years.