How hard is it to take chips off the table at Goldman Sachs? The company's 82 percent drop in second-quarter earnings offers some interesting perspective. Many people think of Goldman Sachs as a prop trading shop, while executives have worked hard to portray itself as a client-driven agency-type shop. The truth is that Goldman Sachs (NYSE: GS) is both.

In the second quarter, the firm really wanted to take some chips off the table. According to Bloomberg, the firm reduced the size of its market bets during the quarter to the lowest level in three years as measured by value-at-risk. VAR, a measure of how much the firm could lose in a single day of trading, fell to an average of $136 million in the quarter from $161 million in the first quarter and $245 million a year earlier.

However, it got caught on the losing side of the VIX. Its equities trading revenue fell 22 percent in the second quarter from a year earlier to $1.21 billion. The firm explains that it got on the other side of clients hedging against higher volatility. Goldman took the other side of these trades to serve its clients, and got burned. The VAR encapsulates all risk, so the bank was able to lower its exposure. But in some cases, it really can't if it wants to make markets for clients.

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