NEW YORK, June 9 (Reuters) - Bank of America may exceed the initial forecast of 15% growth in second-quarter markets revenue, fueled by the equities business, Co-President Jim DeMare said on Tuesday.
"While credit spreads and the like have remained firm, a lot more of the activity and revenues have been coming from the equity business," he said at a Morgan Stanley U.S. financial services conference.
"That's what we've been seeing, I think, in general for the industry, probably for the last 12 months,"
he said.
Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan said last month that the bank expects trading revenue to jump 15% in the second quarter from a year ago, when the market was hit by the volatility from higher U.S. tariffs.
The global markets' division, which DeMare led until late last year before his promotion, has posted 16 consecutive quarters of growth in revenue, as trading desks generated higher volumes from increased client activity.
The business is now on track for the seventeenth straight quarter of growth.
DeMare also said that the IPO pipeline remains strong.
His comments came at a time when Wall Street is gearing up for the expected blockbuster debut of Elon Musk's SpaceX, while OpenAI and Anthropic have also moved closer to going public through confidential U.S. IPO filings.
"Corporate spreads are tight, that's obviously attractive for both M&A and general capex," DeMare said.
The U.S.-Israeli war with Iran, now in its fourth month, has driven up energy and shipping costs, stoking inflation and creating volatility across global financial markets.
But "nothing really of any note is being canceled," DeMare said, adding that clients were primarily debating the timing of transactions and hoping for a quick resolution in the Middle East.
(Reporting by Saeed Azhar and Prakhar Srivastava; Editing by Mark Porter and Shinjini Ganguli)
