Banker Bonuses Jumping While Traders Brace for Smaller Payouts

Wall Street bankers are celebrating this bonus season, while the party in trading divisions is somewhat more subdued.

Buoyed by record debt-underwriting fees as corporations took advantage of cheap financing, bankers saw their bonuses for last year swell while colleagues in sales and trading braced for smaller payouts. That gap may only widen in 2018 as the U.S. tax overhaul sparked the hottest start for mergers in nearly two decades.

The dynamic was at play at JPMorgan Chase & Co., the biggest Wall Street firm by revenue, where investment bankers’ 2017 bonus pool grew by about 5 percent, while ...