[Photo: A plot of the Lorenz attractor.]

This commentary by BloombergView's Matt Levine is tied into today's story (of interest) Goldman to Outsource SigmaX Dark Pool Ops to Nasdaq. 

Simon is a program for designing and selling structured notes, and Goldman has given it away to 3^rd-party brokerages and opened it up to 3^rd-party issuers in a bid to make it a universal platform rather than just a proprietary tool. And while it has a cutesy name, it is actually an acronym for ... "Structured Investment Marketplace and Online Network."

One advantage of such programs is that they offer investment banks a new way to try and make money. In this era of superlow interest rates and tougher regulation.  Rather than using their own balance sheets to do risky trades, programs like Simon make it relatively more attractive for banks to control the pipes through which trades move.  That said, it should be noted that Simon serves in large part as a marketing tool to help Goldman ... use its own balance sheet to do more principal trades.

A second aspect and advantage to Simon is that it enables Goldman to present itself as a tech company.  That's good, because tech companies are rich and successful and culturally dominant and basically well-liked, while banks have lost a lot of cachet and centrality. Even within the financial industry, much of the buzz is about fintech startups, which at least have a positive optimistic story to tell, instead of the endless parade of misery that comes out of most banks.

And if Goldman can come across as being both a bank and a tech company, imagine the advantages Goldman might have competing with pure tech companies on the recruiting front.  All the advantages of working at a tech company, along with the opportunity, if they are good, to one day make $100 million trading bonds.