(Reuters) - Morgan Stanley reported a 55 percent jump in first-quarter earnings as higher revenue from the bank's institutional securities business augmented another strong quarter from wealth management.
Morgan Stanley's shares rose 2.7 percent to $30.70 in pre-market trading on Thursday.
The sixth-largest U.S. bank by assets reported net income applicable to the company of $1.45 billion, or 74 cents per share, compared with $936 million, or 48 cents per share, a year earlier.
Morgan Stanley also said it would buy back up to another $1 billion of shares and double its dividend this year.
Although volumes were lower across most fixed-income businesses, revenue from Morgan Stanley's fixed income and commodities sales and trading rose 13 percent to $1.7 billion.
This reflected strong performance in commodities and solid results in credit and securitized products, the bank said.
Morgan Stanley's decision to dive deeper into the wealth-management business has also helped to shield it from the decline in fixed-income trading revenue that has been happening across Wall Street for the past five years.
Morgan Stanley said its wealth management division's pre-tax profit margin was 19 percent in the quarter ended March 31, up from 17 percent in the same quarter a year earlier.
Wealth management revenue rose 4 percent to $3.62 billion and the division's earnings were up 65 percent to $423 million.
(Reporting by Anil D'Silva in Bangalore and Lauren Tara LaCapra in New York; Editing by Robin Paxton)