The Chicago Options Protocol · Community

The Floor.

A working room of verified derivatives practitioners — and the people who taught them. You don't buy your way in. You qualify.

MEMBERSHIP IS EARNED
One pass stands between you and the room. Sit Part I of the Qualifying Test — it's free, and it's the only door.
Ten questions · no cost · take it in one sitting. Pass Part I and your entry options unlock here.
What's inside

A room with the directors in it

Most communities are a crowd. The Floor is a desk — small, verified, and close to the people who built the curriculum.

01

The directors are in the room

Connolly, Volpe, Fay and Hadley don't drop in for a webinar and leave. They read the threads, answer the hard ones, and bring the questions back from the desk.
02

Monthly Townhalls

Live sessions where the directors take the market apart in real time — what's pricing strangely, what the skew is saying, what they'd actually do. Recorded for members who can't make the hour.
03

Verified peers only

Everyone in the room cleared the same assessment. No noise, no novices working out what a put is — conversation that assumes you already speak the language.
04

The desk, not the textbook

Scenarios, post-mortems, and the kind of judgement that doesn't make it into the recordings. The reasoning that sits between the theory and the trade.

Why there's a door

The bar is the point.

Anyone can open a Discord. What no one else does is gate a derivatives community by examination-verified mastery of the instruments themselves. The Qualifying Test isn't a marketing funnel — it's the membership criterion. It's why the conversation inside is worth your time, and why the people in it are worth knowing.

You're not paying for access. You're paying to be in a room where everyone else also earned their place.

Who's in the room

Four careers, one trading floor

The course directors of the Aurora Partnership — and the practitioners you'll be sitting alongside.


Prof. Kevin B. Connolly, Ph.D.

Quantitative Research

Author of Buying and Selling Volatility and Pricing Convertible Bonds; former Director at Cresvale International.


Santo Volpe

35-Year Veteran

Former Global Risk Advisor at Refco and co-founder of Eden Rock Capital Management.


Hilton Fay

Floor & Exchanges

Four decades across New York exchanges, LIFFE and Asia — regarded by Santo as among the finest options traders he has known.


Michael Hadley

Quantitative Research

35 years across the CSCE, LIFFE, Cresvale, Refco and TransMarket Group; founder of John Galt Trading Consultants.

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The four met where careers in this market were made — on the exchange floors of the late 1990s, with the Cresvale International connection running through all of them. The Floor is, in a sense, that desk reassembled.

One pass. One room.

The Qualifying Test is free and takes a single sitting. Everything else opens from there.