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Goldman Sachs helps big companies, investors, and governments raise money and trade, and also manages money for people and runs a consumer bank.
Goldman Sachs is not one business—it's basically two big money machines bolted together: a dealmaking and trading engine, and a wealth management arm. The dealmaking side serves giant corporations and governments. When a company wants to buy another company, or go public on the stock market, or raise cash by selling bonds, it calls Goldman. Goldman earns fat fees for arranging these deals, like a wedding planner who charges a percentage of the wedding budget. The trading side is where Goldman buys and sells stocks, bonds, currencies, and complicated contracts for clients all day long, and also trades its own money. Think of it as running the world's most sophisticated pawn shop, currency exchange, and insurance desk under one roof. This trading and investment banking work still brings in the biggest slice of revenue—roughly two-thirds—and it is extremely volatile: huge profits in busy markets, painful losses in quiet or panicky ones.
The second machine is asset and wealth management, which now pulls in around a third of revenue and is growing steadily. Here Goldman manages money for pension funds, endowments, and rich families, charging a fee based on how much money it looks after. This part is boring in the best way—predictable fees that smooth out the wild swings of trading. Goldman has been pushing hard into this steadier business because investors hate surprises. It also had a famous fling with consumer banking—the Marcus brand, savings accounts and personal loans for regular people—but that experiment mostly flopped, cost the firm billions, and has largely been wound down or sold off. That retreat was a big deal: it marked the end of Goldman's attempt to be a bank for Main Street, not just Wall Street.
On the money side, Goldman makes its profit from the spread between what it charges clients and what it pays to run the operation, plus gains on its own investments. It is a "people business"—its real assets walk out the door every night—so it pays huge salaries and bonuses, and it is famous for being brutally competitive. When it has leftover cash, it pays dividends and buys back its own stock (roughly a few percent of shares each year, though the exact figure moves around), and it reinvests in technology and talent. The company started in 1869 in New York, and its headquarters are still there, in lower Manhattan. Its customers choose it because it has deep pockets, global reach, and a reputation for getting huge, complicated deals done—and because, in finance, being the firm that
Saved answer · last researched 14 Oct 2026