EYES ON GOLDMAN

Street wonders if Lloyd has turned it around

This time, Goldman Sachs has no excuse.

Analysts are singling out the Wall Street powerhouse as big banks begin to report earnings in the coming week. A year of botched results and talk of succession has left Goldman a laggard.

The major US banks, including JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo, Citigroup, Morgan Stanley and Bank of America, are set to report their earnings for the first three months of 2018 — an unusually turbulent period in the markets.

And while investors will be poring over all the banks for clues about the strength of the companies and the economy at large, it’s Goldman Sachs that’s going to get the most scrutiny, analysts say.

Goldman, led by CEO Lloyd Blankfein, has been struggling to regain footing in its critical trading units for two years, and executives have been quick to blame a lack of volatility in the market as a culprit for their weak results.

But the first three months of 2018 saw a spike in market volatility — including the largest-ever single-day point drop in the Dow Jones industrial average, of 1,175, on Feb. 5.

“This is one of those things where, if management says ‘this is what we need,’ and the environment gives it to you, you hope it turns out like how management guides,” Michael Wong, analyst at Morningstar, told The Post.

“If they underperform in trading, there will be a lot of questions from analysts and investors about why they didn’t do well.”

Last year, Goldman reported a measly 1 percent increase in trading of bonds, currencies and commodities, and had apparently ceded ground to its rivals.

Marty Chavez, the bank’s chief financial officer, had blamed the unusually calm markets for the weakness — an explanation that Wall Street took with a grain of salt.

“Hard to put lipstick on these results, given solid expectations and peer results so far,” rival bank UBS said in an analyst note at the time.

Since the year-before quarter was so bad, analysts are downplaying a big yearover-year jump in revenue, Wong said.

To be sure, it’s unclear if the bank can profit off trading since some of their biggest customers, hedge funds, haven’t been able to take advantage of the market turbulence.

Hedge funds that take bets on big trends, or macroeconomics, “have been getting whipsawed back and forth,” said Adam Taback, head of global alternative investments for Wells Fargo Investment Institute.

For instance, Renaissance Technologies, which has around $58 billion in assets, lost 5.4 percent in early February when markets fell violently — a sign the fund was caught off guard by the tumble.

It’s unclear how it performed for the quarter as a whole.