Good News! The Q2-2012 of Automated Trader is now officially launched and will be hitting desks in the next few days.

Something that frequently crops up in conversation with readers - especially those on the buyside - is how to best to manage change and the unexpected; perhaps not surprising given the nature of the business we're in. Sometimes the challenge is small-scale, such as how best to tweak one parameter in a trading model, while at other times it involves a much larger transformation.

For a great example of how to manage this latter type of change successfully, take a look at our buyside interview where you'll find an account of how Richard Franklin and Chris Mellen, respectively CEO and Head of Research at Baronia Capital, managed the automation of the firm's existing core long volatility strategy across multiple markets and timeframes. And how they also introduced and automated a portfolio of non-core models in order to further improve risk adjusted returns.

Another organisation that seems to come with change management wired in is Bloomberg, as emerged in our conversation with the company's Chief Technology Officer, Shawn Edwards for our Techs Message feature. Among many other things, Shawn talks in detail about getting the best out of people and technology and identifying the value in IT trends.

While the demand for non-displayed liquidity in Europe remains strong and the growth of European dark pools continues, there are pools and then there are pools. The quality of liquidity in a dark pool depends not only on the participants, but also on the quality control the dark pool operator is able to exert. Moreover, as Christian Hesse, Senior Quantitative Strategist for Autobahn Equity Algorithmic Trading at Deutsche Bank explains in "Dark Pools: Quality, Control and Change" there is the issue of pending regulatory change to consider.

For a tale of managing the unexpected (hence the black swan and butterfly on the cover), read Swan Luck where we examine how CEP technology can now deliver value across multiple aspects of the trading process. If on the other hand, you're looking for a classic example of how to turn a challenge into an opportunity, read about how the switch to centralised clearing of OTC instruments caused Christian Martin and his colleagues Lennie Nuara and Daniel Droste to found TeraExchange in our Exchange Views feature.

As traders find themselves exploring new markets, time-frames, data types and geographies in search of alpha, an important question arises. Do they want to manage the integration and maintenance of all these variables, or just trade? Mark Pesonen, CEO, Enterprise Products & Solutions at Bloomberg explains why the latter is the right answer, and also how it can be accomplished in " Plumbing or Trading: The Financial Technology Maze ".

While machine readable news has been around for a few years now, many solutions have been rather modest in terms of their geography, depth/uniqueness of content and potential user base. However, as Georg Gross, Head of Front Office Data & Analytics at Deutsche Börse explains in " Latest News on the News " that's now all changing for the better.

If you're looking to an antidote to all this change talk, our Software Review finds the Wrecking Crew doing what they've always done - trying to break something. In this case it's RTS's RTD Tango QUANT application, and much to their disappointment they didn't succeed...

FPGA's make the news again - hardly surprising given the dramatic growth we're witnessing in that space. If its field-programmable, its more flexible than an ASIC. And if its a post-crash, over-regulated, potentially lucrative but problematic market, its going to take all the flexibility you can find (and probably more) to build an effective alpha-extracting solution for trading it. James Fitzgerald debates the contemporary case for FPGAs in " How CPUseful is that ".

We hope you enjoy the issue.