Bank of America reported a smaller-than-expected quarterly loss on Wednesday.
Shares of Bank of America were higher in premarket trading following the report. (Get the latest quote here.)
The company posted third-quarter loss of 1 cent a share, compared to 20 cents per share in the year-earlier period.
Revenue for the quarter came in at $21.21 billion, against the comparable year-ago figure of $21.53 billion.
"These look like pretty good results," Jeffery Harte, principal of Sandler O'Neill, said on "Squawk Box."
The financial institution was helped by better-than-expected credit, expenses, and trading revenues, as well as fee income inline with expectations, Harte said.
"I think the areas people were worried about is would they get the expenses, would they kind of continue to be able to cut it on the investment banking and trading side, and to what extent can they keep that interest income up there because loans are still kind of declining with the runoff portfolio [and it] all came in positive," he said.
Analysts had expected Bank of America to report a loss of about 9 cents per share on $21.36 billion in revenue, according to a consensus estimate from Thomson Reuters.
The company was expected to report a loss in part because of a $17 billion legal settlement during the quarter. The charges primarily concerned subprime lending conducted by Merrill Lynch and Countrywide—both of which Bank of America acquired during the financial crisis.