Factbox - Wall Street and commodity risk: Morgan Stanley risk rises
(Reuters) - Morgan Stanley's (NYSE: MS) commodity market trading risk measure, known as Value-at-Risk (VaR), rose in the three months through September, the bank said on Monday, the third Wall Street bank to report earnings.
The bank's VaR indicator was $17 million, up $1 million from the prior quarter and $2 million from the same period a year earlier. Morgan Stanley's earnings from fixed-income and commodities fell sharply to $918 million in the third quarter, down 19 percent from a year ago, as the bank's quarterly profit dropped 42 percent.
The results come after a slump in China's stock market and worries over sluggish growth in the world's second-biggest economy triggered a fresh rout across the industrial material sector.
The VaR is often a key risk-reward indicator that can measure the commodities exposure of Wall Street banks, as they typically group commodities revenue under the fixed income category and do not break out the sector.
(Reporting by Chris Prentice; Editing by Bernadette Baum)