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Trading and investment banking buoyed third-quarter results at BNP Paribas, helping offset weakness in commercial and retail operations at the Eurozone’s biggest bank.

The Paris-listed lender reported quarterly net income of €2.87bn, 5.9 per cent higher than a year ago, and a 2.7 per cent increase in revenues to €11.9bn. Both figures were in line with analysts’ expectations.

Gains were driven by BNP’s global markets business, with a particularly sharp uptick in demand for prime brokerage services as hedge funds sought to capitalise on volatile equity markets and uncertainty around major global events such as the US election.

Although investment banks across Europe and the US have reported strong performance in equities trading this quarter, BNP posted gains across both its equities and fixed-income trading businesses.

Revenues in BNP’s equity and prime services division were 13 per cent higher than a year ago at €820mn, while its fixed-income traders increased revenues by 12 per cent to €1.2bn.

The bank’s historic strength has been fixed income. But it is now benefiting from several years of investment in its equities business and from building up its prime brokerage offering, where it has taken over teams and clients from Deutsche Bank.

The bank also benefited from the tentative recovery in investment banking. Revenues in its global banking operations rose 5.9 per cent, driven by capital markets activity across Europe, Middle East and Africa and transaction banking in the Americas and the Asia-Pacific region.

This balanced out some weakness in commercial and retail banking which fell 2.6 per cent in the quarter — below consensus estimates from Oddo BHF — due to falling revenues from disposals of used cars at its long-term rental service Arval.

Shares in the French bank, which is seen as a proxy for the economy, sank after President Emmanuel Macron unexpectedly dissolved parliament and called elections in June.

However, they have recovered after the July vote delivered a hung parliament and are up more than 3 per cent this year for a market value of €74bn. They trail the Stoxx 600 banking index which has gained more than 20 per cent in the same period.  

“The third quarter illustrates corporate and investment banking’s capacity to gain market share and . . . strong business momentum especially in insurance and asset management,” said chief executive Jean-Laurent Bonnafé. He added that the commercial and retail banking operation “is likely to gradually benefit from the positive shift in the rate environment”. 

BNP said it had achieved €655mn in cost savings in the first nine months of 2024 against a target of €1bn, with a further €345mn expected in the final quarter.

The bank’s common equity tier one ratio fell 30 basis points in the three months to September 30 to 12.7 per cent, but the measure of financial resilience remains well above regulatory requirements and the banks own target.

“BNP remains very attractive in terms of risk [versus] reward as it is very diversified with a solid balance sheet,” analysts at Oddo BHF wrote ahead of the results. 

BNP affirmed its full-year guidance, including a target to increase revenues by at least 2 per cent over 2023 levels.

With less than a week to go until the 2024 election, more than 57.5 million Americans have already voted, according to the Election Lab at the University of Florida. The number represents more than a third of the total turnout for the 2020 elections – it is hard to say what it means, as 2020 saw a high number of mail-in votes because of the Covid pandemic, but turnout in some states indicates that the Republican push for supporters to vote early is working.

Dressed in an orange hi-vis vest after a campaign stunt in a garbage truck, Republican nominee Donald Trump used a rally in Green Bay, Wisconsin, to take aim at the Democrats over Joe Biden’s “garbage” comments, thanked sanitation workers and promised to protect women “whether they like it or not”.

Elsewhere in Wisconsin, Kamala Harris appealed to first-time voters, for whom she said the issues of climate change, gun control, and abortion access are “not political. This is your lived experience.” She was speaking shortly after a new CNN poll showed her six points ahead of Trump in the state.

Here’s what else happened on Wednesday:

Kamala Harris election news and updates

• Harris spoke in Harrisburg, the Pennsylvania state capital, which is in one of the few counties that voted for Joe Biden in 2020. Polls show a tied race in Pennsylvania, which both campaigns are competing fiercely for. The path to winning 270 electoral votes is much more difficult for the candidate who loses Pennsylvania. Harris did not mention the racist remark about Puerto Rico made by a comedian at Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally on Sunday, but the state’s sizeable Latino and Puerto Rican population could be a decisive voting bloc.

• The former Republican governor of California Arnold Schwarzenegger has announced that he is backing Harris in next week’s election. In a long post on X, Schwarzenegger, 77, said that while he doesn’t “really do endorsements”, he felt compelled to formally endorse Harris and her pick for vice-president, Tim Walz.

• In an op-ed for the Guardian, Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders addressed progressives’ concerns about voting for Harris given the Biden administration’s stance on Israel’s war on Gaza. “I understand that there are millions of Americans who disagree with Joe Biden and Kamala Harris on the terrible war in Gaza. I am one of them,” he writes, adding that “on this issue, Donald Trump and his rightwing friends are worse.”

Donald Trump election news and updates

• Before his Green Bay rally, refused to apologise for the comments made about Puerto Rico at his Madison Square Garden rally, instead repeating his assertion that he did not know who the comedian was or how he got booked. “He’s a comedian, what can I tell you? I know nothing about him. I don’t know why he’s there.”

• A Pennsylvania judge on Wednesday sided with Trump’s campaign and agreed to extend an in-person voting option in suburban Philadelphia, where long lines on the final day led to complaints voters were being disfranchised by an unprepared election office.

• The House speaker, Mike Johnson, said there would be “massive” healthcare changes if Trump wins next Tuesday, including abolishing Obamacare. “Healthcare reform’s going to be a big part of the agenda,” Johnson, speaking at a rally in Pennsylvania on Monday, told the crowd. “When I say we’re going to have a very aggressive first 100 days agenda, we got a lot of things still on the table.”

Elsewhere on the campaign trail

• A Republican former congressional candidate was charged with stealing ballots during a test of a voting system in Madison county, Indiana, state police said on Tuesday. During the test on 3 October, which involved four voting machines and 136 candidate ballots marked for testing, officials discovered that two ballots were missing, according to the Indiana state police.

• A majority of voters in swing states do not believe Trump will accept defeat if he loses next week’s presidential election and fear that his supporters will turn to violence in an attempt to install him in power, a new poll suggests.

• The pace of US economic growth slowed over the summer but continued its two-year expansion, according to data released on Wednesday. US gross domestic product (GDP) – a broad measure of economic health – rose by 2.8% in the third quarter, short of economists’ expectations of 3.1%, and down from the previous quarter’s 3% reading.

• Officials in south-west Washington were able to salvage almost 500 damaged ballots from a ballot box that was set on fire on Monday in what officials have called an attack on democracy. An unknown number of ballots were destroyed when someone placed incendiary devices in a drop box in Vancouver, Washington, while three ballots were damaged in a fire at a box in nearby Portland, Oregon. Those fires and one other are linked, officials have said.

Read more about the 2024 US election:

Unlock the Editor’s Digest for free

Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.

Investing in technology companies involves weighing up expected quantities of jam today, jam tomorrow and jam at some unknown future date. Facebook parent Meta Platforms and Microsoft are serving up just enough of each.

Both reported earnings on Wednesday that — like Google parent Alphabet the previous day — outpaced what analysts expected. Microsoft’s cloud computing business increased revenue by 22 per cent, a little faster than the previous quarter. Meta’s sales of advertising increased by 19 per cent, and it exacted 11 per cent more per ad than a year earlier. Today’s jam, then, is safely taken care of.

Tomorrow is less certain. Since artificial intelligence mania took hold, quarterly earnings have become a kind of sanity check, whereby investors reassess how they feel about tech companies’ lavish investment plans. Steady share prices depend on corporate chiefs like Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg and Microsoft’s Satya Nadella walking a fine line between being bullish about AI’s potential and remaining credible about its financial returns.

On that front, the $1.5tn-valued Meta is in the more precarious position. It has told investors to brace for “significant acceleration” in capital expenditure next year. Spending is already double what it was three years ago, weighing in at a quarter of revenue. Like Microsoft, Meta is buying chips and servers, but where Microsoft in effect rents space in its cloud to clients, Meta’s is largely for its own use.

Meta’s other challenge is that, compared with some of its peers, its boldest prospects are relatively long-tailed. That makes it different from chipmaker Nvidia, say, which sells AI-enabling silicon for real money. Microsoft already has recurring revenue from corporate customers. Facebook, meanwhile, is building new products such as social network Threads, virtual assistants and AI-generated video ads with yet-to-be determined value.

Zuckerberg has at least read the room, and is making the case that AI will bring near-term pay-offs too. More than 1mn advertisers used Meta’s generative AI tools in the past month, for example, and the company thinks those tools make users 7 per cent more likely to click. Analysts have raised their forecasts for Meta’s revenue in 2026 by $30bn over the past year, to $210bn, according to LSEG.

As for the distant-future jam — such as the recently unveiled augmented-reality holographic glasses the company describes as “the next great leap” — investors aren’t putting much weight on that at all. Meta’s share price has risen 70 per cent this year, but that still implies almost $400bn of negative value for its far-out bets, Morgan Stanley analysts believe. Big ideas can drive big valuations, but only up to a point.

john.foley@ft.com