"For every fool that pulls out of investment banking there is another one waiting to take their place." This adage, coined by a senior investment banker in the 1990s, is a neat summary of the fortunes of the investment banking industry over the past decade.

It has been a decade in which (mainly) European banks have lost hundreds of millions of pounds by failing to become global players in an industry they either did not fully understand, were not culturally wedded to or did not have deep enough pockets for. But the decade has, above all, been punctuated by astonishing growth and profitability at banks that got things right.