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Train your desk. Certify your traders.
License the protocol.
Trained by the same team your institution would have hired in 1997.
Professor Kevin B. Connolly and his fellow Course Directors have between them trained many cohorts of professional and institutional derivatives traders — at desks in London, Singapore, Hong Kong and New York, and inside firms whose names sit at the foundation of the modern volatility market.
Three of the four Course Directors traded under Kevin's risk-management architecture at Cresvale International. Their teaching is the same protocol they used to run those books — the volatility surface, the convertible bond, the structural risk vocabulary of the institutional desk.
We're also here for you.
Choose how the protocol enters your institution.
In-house training for your team.
Book the Course Directors directly to deliver Level I, Level II or a combined curriculum for your traders, analysts or investment team — calibrated to your mandate, your products and your regulatory frame.
- Delivered by Santo Volpe, Hilton Fay, Michael Hadley and Kevin Connolly
- Curriculum tuned to your underlyings — equity, fixed income, FX, commodities
- Live work on your team's actual positions, hedges and risk reports
- CPDSO-recognised — counts toward CPD obligations for your staff
- Group sizes from 4 to 40; larger cohorts on enquiry
Certify your traders.
Have your existing trading staff sit the COPC examination — or layer it onto an in-house or white-labelled programme. The credential is awarded individually to each trader who passes, under the same proctored conditions and assessment standard as the public examination.
- Live remote-proctored examination — biometric ID, browser lockdown, invigilator review
- Awarded to each candidate who passes; not a corporate badge
- COPC designation, CPD-recognised credential, listed in the global registry
- Annual Maintenance Fee of EUR 195 for ongoing active status
- Cohort pricing tiers from 10+ candidates; corporate billing available
- Stacks with in-house training or white-label, or sat stand-alone
White-label our courses.
License the Level I and Level II video curriculum, materials and Excel models for delivery to your own clients, staff or members under your brand. The protocol stays. The marque becomes yours.
- Full curriculum — Level I and Level II videos, workbooks, models
- Your branding, your colours, your domain — via LearnWorlds LTI or your LMS
- Optional integration of the COPC certification pathway for your end-users
- Annual licensing under multi-year terms; volume tiers above 250 seats
- Co-branding option: "Powered by The Chicago Options Protocol"
Four careers. Three continents. One institutional moment.
Prof. Kevin B. Connolly, Ph.D.
Author of Buying and Selling Volatility (Wiley, 1997) and Pricing Convertible Bonds (Wiley, 1998). Former Head of Quantitative Research at James Capel & Co. (later HSBC).
Santo Volpe
35-year derivatives veteran. Floor market maker on the CBOT and LIFFE. Former Global Risk Advisor at Refco. Co-founder and CIO of Eden Rock Capital Management (USD 3 bn AUM).
Hilton Fay
40-year derivatives trader. Member of four New York exchanges. Senior Derivatives Trader on LIFFE and the IPE. Established the Hong Kong office of Vantage Derivatives.
Michael Hadley
35-year derivatives trader and credentialed performance coach. NYCSCE, LIFFE, and the Asian volatility desks at Cresvale, Refco and TransMarket in Singapore.
Why institutions choose this curriculum over the alternatives.
Most options education today sits at one of two extremes. Academic programmes confer credentials but are taught by people who have never traded the surface in size. Retail platforms hand out badges that mean nothing on an institutional CV.
The Chicago Options Protocol was built deliberately to occupy neither of those positions — and that is exactly the gap institutional buyers tell us they need closed for their teams.
- Live-risk pedagogy, not theory alone.The team teaches what they used to manage real books — Greeks as a working risk vocabulary, not a textbook chapter.
- A credential that travels.The COPC designation is awarded to individual traders under proctored conditions, listed in a public registry, and maintained under formal CPD standards. It travels on a CV — and back into your firm as evidence of trained capability.
- Calibrated to your mandate.Equity-linked desks, FX overlays, family-office hedging, prop-desk volatility books — the curriculum is tuned to the underlyings your team actually trades.
- Confidential by design.In-house engagements are delivered under NDA. White-label terms include carve-outs for your client list, your branding and your distribution geography.
The questions institutional buyers most often ask us.
If you don't see your question here, the team will answer it directly — usually on a 15-minute call.
Who actually delivers the training?
The four Course Directors of Aurora Partnership — Professor Kevin B. Connolly, Santo Volpe, Hilton Fay and Michael Hadley — deliver in-house engagements personally. For larger multi-cohort programmes, a senior associate from Aurora may co-deliver under their direction. The video curriculum used in white-label deployments is recorded with the same four directors.
This matters because the structural credibility of the curriculum is inseparable from the people teaching it — three of the four traded under Kevin's risk-management architecture at Cresvale International in the late 1990s. We do not subcontract delivery to third-party trainers.
Can the curriculum be tailored to our team's specific underlyings or trading mandate?
Yes. Every in-house engagement begins with a scoping conversation in which we calibrate the curriculum to your team's products — equity-linked, fixed income, FX, commodities, convertibles — and to your internal risk and pricing infrastructure.
Where appropriate and under NDA, we work directly with your team's actual positions, hedges and risk reports. The structural backbone of the protocol stays constant; the worked examples, case studies and exercises are tuned to what your team actually trades.
What experience level is the curriculum pitched at?
Level I assumes financial-markets fluency but no specialised options background. It is appropriate for analysts, junior traders, family-office investment teams, allocators and experienced practitioners who want a structured foundation.
Level II assumes Level I or equivalent fluency and is pitched at trading-desk professionals working actively with the volatility surface — Greeks as a working risk vocabulary, skew and term structure, regime-shift management.
Most institutional cohorts run both levels in sequence. Senior practitioners with strong foundations sometimes enter directly at Level II.
Do you deliver on-site, remotely, or both — and across which time zones?
Both. On-site delivery works for clients in any geography reachable by the directors' travel; the most frequent are London, the major continental European centres, Singapore, Hong Kong, Dubai and the US East Coast. Remote live delivery via webinar runs across all time zones.
Many institutional engagements run as a hybrid — opening sessions on-site with the directors, follow-on sessions remote — which we find delivers the best balance of presence and scheduling flexibility for trading-desk participants.
How long does an engagement take, and what's the typical cohort size?
Level I typically runs as five to six sessions of two hours each, scheduled at the cadence your team can absorb (commonly weekly over six weeks). Level II runs roughly ten focused hours, often delivered as two intensive blocks. Combined Level I + II programmes total 18–22 hours of contact time. Self-paced video tracks for white-label deployments are 12–15 hours per level.
Standard cohorts run from 4 to 40 participants. Single-team engagements (one trading desk, one investment team) work best at 6–12. Larger programmes run as parallel cohorts. Below 4 we usually scope the engagement as Bespoke Mentoring rather than a cohort.
How is the COPC examination conducted, and is it the same exam our retail candidates would sit?
Yes — it is the same examination, administered under the same proctored conditions: live remote proctoring with biometric ID verification, browser lockdown and recorded session review by an invigilator. The integrity of the credential depends on every candidate sitting to the same standard.
Cohort logistics — group sittings, scheduling around business-day constraints, dedicated invigilation windows — are arranged by our institutional team. The examination itself remains identical.
What is the retake policy, and does the credential expire?
Candidates who do not pass may retake the examination after a defined cooling-off period at a discounted retake fee. Retake protocols follow standard institutional credentialing practice.
The COPC designation does not expire as long as the holder maintains active status through the COPC Annual Membership (EUR 295 per year) and meets the CPD continuing-education requirements. Lapsed designations can be reinstated under a defined process.
Will the credential count toward CPDUK or other professional CE obligations for our staff?
The curriculum is recognised by the CPDUK (The CPD Certification Service) for Continuing Professional Development. CFA charterholders may self-report COPC qualifying activity toward their annual Professional Learning attestation.
Holders of CISI, CAIA, FRM and other major designations should consult their respective bodies; in our experience the COPC is widely accepted as relevant continuing education. We supply formal completion records and CPD hours documentation for every cohort.
How is pricing structured, and can we use our own NDA, MSA and procurement terms?
In-house training is priced per engagement rather than per seat, and scales with curriculum scope and cohort size. White-label licensing is annualised on a per-seat basis with multi-year terms (typically two- or three-year), with volume tiers above 250 seats. Cohort certification is priced per candidate with discount tiers from 10+ candidates.
We have standard NDA and MSA templates available, but routinely paper engagements under our institutional clients' own agreements. Our legal team reviews redlines and responds within standard procurement timelines.
Do you teach competitors of our firm?
We treat client identities as confidential by default and do not publish a client list without written permission.
For sensitive engagements — particularly proprietary trading firms and single-strategy hedge funds — we offer time-limited exclusivity carve-outs in defined geographies or product areas, negotiated as part of the engagement. The certification programme itself remains open: institutions buying COPC examination cohorts cannot bar their competitors' traders from sitting the public examination, just as no professional body does.