Goldman Sachs edged past Morgan Stanley on style points in the third quarter, but not on substance. Lloyd Blankfein’s firm cranked out $2 billion of earnings in the three months to the end of September, at an annualized return on equity of 10.9 percent. That bested the 9.6 percent showing of Goldman’s main Wall Street rival — the first time this year that it has come out ahead. Morgan Stanley’s boss, James Gorman, though, has crafted a more attractive-looking business for the longer term.

Goldman still has strengths. It came back from a dismal first-half performance trading fixed income, currencies and commodities, reporting a 26 percent year-on-year decline in revenue from that business. While horrid, that places Goldman in the Wall Street pack rather than behind it. And the firm leads its peers in merger advice. Fees generated by Goldman’s deal makers increased by 38 percent in the quarter, year on year, where the industry fee pool fell by 9 percent, according to Thomson Reuters data.

The trouble is that most of Goldman’s outperformance last quarter was thanks to gains on its private-equity portfolio, which helped push revenue in its equity investing division up by more than half, to $1.4 billion. Without that, the bank’s annualized return on equity would have been less than 9 percent. Such gains tend to be lumpy, so they can’t be relied upon every quarter.

Morgan Stanley’s earnings look more repeatable. That’s largely because wealth management is now purring along nicely, even managing a 26.5 percent pretax margin, which beats Mr. Gorman’s target for the year. The unit brings in almost half the company’s revenue while using just a quarter of its capital. Mr. Blankfein’s efforts to diversify Goldman’s earnings are still relatively tiny — one example is Marcus, the fast-growing but small retail-banking business. At Morgan Stanley, Mr. Gorman also has a fixed-income trading business that has weathered recent storms far better than Mr. Blankfein’s.