The bank's 991 million euro ($1.2 billion) net profit easily beat market expectations and won investor praise for Chief Executive Josef Ackermann, who is facing a possible retrial for controversial bonus payments at telecoms firm Mannesmann.
Deutsche Bank's trading income, made by buying and selling shares and other securities, shot up 60 percent to 2 billion euros, mirroring similar results at US rivals such as Goldman Sachs, Merrill Lynch and Morgan Stanley.
"The figures are really very good," said Dieter Ewald, a fund manager at Frankfurt Trust, a Deutsche shareholder. He pointed to rising profits at Deutsche's investment bank as well as the division which houses its German bank branch business.
"It shows that Ackermann has done a good job and confirms his importance to Deutsche," Ewald added.
Deutsche Bank was at one stage the top gainer on the German benchmark DAX index, but later the shares pared their gain and were trading at 76.05 euros by 1029 GMT, up 0.3 percent.
Ackermann said in a statement that he was confident Deutsche Bank would hit its profit target for the year, which he has said is equivalent to a pretax profit of about 6 billion euros.
The bank, which has cut more than 4,600 jobs so far this year, hopes to achieve a pretax return on equity (ROE) of 25 percent in 2005, and reached 28 percent in the first nine months.
Finance chief Clemens Boersig told analysts that progress so far has brought it most of the way towards a dividend of 2.50 euros, almost 50 percent higher than last year.
Despite Ackermann's success in cutting costs and bolstering results since he took the helm in 2002, Deutsche has struggled to win over investors.
They value the bank below most of its international peers, even though its share price has risen about 17 percent this year, outpacing Germany's blue chip DAX index.
Some investors have criticised what they see as the bank's failure to communicate a clear strategy, and others its reliance on trading income and other investment-bank related earners - seen as difficult to predict.
"The volatility is there with the bank's dependence on trading income," said Konrad Becker, an analyst with Merck Finck. "But every quarter people have thought this time it (trading income growth) will have to stop. But it hasn't."
Pretax profit from investment banking rose 136 percent to 1.3 billion euros in the third quarter, lifted by strong trading in shares as well as debt and other securities.
That growth underpinned the rise in net profit, which beat the average forecast of 831 million euros in a Reuters poll of 23 analysts.
"The old issue remains that Deutsche mirrors the markets. It is difficult to tell what this good result means for next year's, for example," said Frankfurt Trust's Ewald. "But Deutsche has said clearly that it is pursuing this business model and investors have to decide if they can live with that."
The risk of a Mannesmann retrial had added further to uncertainty over the bank's future. Last week, Germany's top court raised doubts that Ackermann and other Mannesmann directors were right to approve big pay-offs to managers five years ago, bolstering state prosecutor's hopes that the case against them will be reopened.
Should Ackermann go in the event of a conviction, this would be a problem for Deutsche, said Ewald. "There is no successor but we are very far away from anything like that now," he said.