• A PROFESSIONAL DESIGNATION FOR SERIOUS PRACTITIONERS

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Become Chicago Options Protocol Certified by examination — or train toward
it through our live Level I and Level II curriculum, taught by veterans of
the CBOT, LIFFE, and the institutional risk desks.
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Our teachers

Meet our core team

Santo Volpe
Santo Volpe is a 35-year derivatives veteran whose career began as an options market maker on the floor of the Chicago Board of Trade and the LIFFE... 
Hilton Fay
Hilton Fay is a 40-year derivatives trader whose career spans three continents and the full transition of options markets from open outcry to electronic execution... 
Michael Hadley
Michael Hadley is a 35-year derivatives trader whose career spans three continents and the full transition of options markets from open outcry to electronic execution...
Professor Kevin B. Connolly, Ph.D. 
Professor Kevin B. Connolly, Ph.D. is one of the City of London’s earliest and most influential authorities on volatility trading and convertible-bond pricing, and...
Out team

Meet our core team

Santo Volpe

Course Director, The Chicago Derivatives Protocol
From the Chicago pits to the global risk desk — four decades at the frontier of derivatives.

Santo Volpe's career began where modern options trading itself began: on the floor of the Chicago Board of Trade — the only school that has ever produced generations of great options traders. In 1990 he started as an options market maker on the floor, making markets in U.S. 30-Year Treasury Bond options and Soybean options. He carried that discipline to London, market-making Short Sterling options on the LIFFE and Euromark options at Cresvale — running proprietary books with full responsibility for pricing, hedging, and gamma management.

This is the foundation of what students learn from Santo through The Chicago Derivatives Protocol: not the theory of options, but the mastery that comes only from superior understanding and constant application — thousands of trades, in every volatility regime, over thirty-five years.

The Global Risk Architect
By the late 1990s, Santo had moved from the pit to the centre of institutional risk. At Refco he served as Global Trading and Risk Manager and then Head of Proprietary Trading in London, while concurrently appointed Global Risk Advisor — designing and implementing Refco's worldwide risk management architecture across front and back office, integrating regions and asset classes into a single command structure, reporting directly to the board. This was the global risk management centre where every exposure, every desk, every region converged. In 2002 he co-founded Eden Rock Capital Management as Chief Investment Officer, scaling the platform to approximately USD 3 billion in AUM as a multi-strategy hedge fund integrating equities, fixed income, and derivatives within a single institutional framework. Across his career he has overseen significant assets in excess of USD 5 billion.

Coach to Billionaires and Family Offices
Today Santo advises family offices, ultra-high-net-worth individuals, and institutional allocators on derivatives portfolio construction, risk architecture, and capital preservation. His coaching philosophy rests on a single conviction: sustainable performance comes from the disciplined integration of macro insight, structural portfolio design, and rigorous risk governance — never from prediction, alerts, or signal-following. He treats capital allocation as an architectural problem: balancing opportunity, liquidity, and downside control within frameworks that survive every market regime.

In The Chicago Derivatives Protocol, Santo distills three and a half decades of floor-trading mastery, institutional risk discipline, and private-client coaching into a single curriculum — the lost wisdom of the Chicago pits, codified for the modern professional.

Santo holds an MSc from the University of London and a BA from Northwestern University. He is a Knight Commander of the Order of St Sylvester (KCSS) and holds further honours from the Constantinian Military Order of St George, the Military Order of the Collar, and the Royal House of Aragon.

Professor Kevin B. Connolly, Ph.D.

Course Director, The Chicago Derivatives Protocol
From the academic vanguard of volatility trading to the head of quantitative research and proprietary risk in the City of London — four decades bridging derivatives theory and live market execution.

Kevin Connolly’s career bridges a divide that few derivatives practitioners ever cross. Trained as a quantitative researcher at the doctoral level and appointed to lectureships at City University Business School (now Bayes Business School) and London Guildhall University, he became one of the City of London’s earliest and most influential authorities on volatility trading and convertible-bond pricing. His two seminal works, both published by John Wiley & Sons in their Wiley Trader’s Exchange and Frontiers in Finance series — Buying and Selling Volatility (1997) and Pricing Convertible Bonds (1998) — were among the first books to translate the structural mathematics of volatility into the working language of an institutional desk, and have remained reference works in the field for almost three decades.

This is the foundation Kevin brings to The Chicago Derivatives Protocol: not theory alone, and not floor instinct alone, but the rare integration of both — the doctoral rigor that produces a published treatise on the volatility surface, and the live-risk authority of having run quantitative research and proprietary derivatives books at institutional scale.

The Quantitative Architect: From James Capel to Cresvale

Kevin served as Head of Quantitative Research at James Capel & Co. — then one of the most influential brokers in the City of London, later fully integrated into HSBC — leading the firm’s mathematical-modelling work for asset pricing and derivatives valuation through a transformative era. From there he moved to Cresvale International Asset Management as Director, charged with instituting rigorous risk-management protocols across the firm’s principal Japanese warrants market-making operation — at the time one of the most volatile and structurally complex segments of the global derivatives market.

It was at Cresvale that Kevin came to oversee the books and risk of three of his fellow Chicago Derivatives Protocol Course Directors. Santo Volpe traded under him in London. Hilton Fay was appointed to Cresvale on Michael Hadley’s recommendation while Mike was running the firm’s Singapore desk. The four of them traded under the same risk architecture, in the same firm, at the same institutional moment — a working relationship that has continued, in one form or another, for more than three decades.

Kevin subsequently conducted specialised research into complex volatility trading at Refco Overseas Ltd. — where Santo had by then become Global Risk Advisor — and led the design of advanced sales and trading systems for Japanese warrants and convertible bonds at Independent Capital Corporation.

Aurora Partnership and the Chicago Derivatives Protocol

Today Kevin serves as a Senior Advisor at Aurora Partnership, where he collaborates with Santo, Hilton and Mike on the institutional training of derivatives professionals and on the management of equity, fixed-income and FX portfolios using sophisticated options structures. Within The Chicago Derivatives Protocol his role is the academic and structural counterweight to the live-risk pedagogy of his fellow Course Directors — the published authority on volatility and convertible-bond pricing whose work has been on derivatives trading-desk reading lists since the late 1990s.

In The Chicago Derivatives Protocol, Kevin contributes the doctoral rigor, the convertible-bond and warrant lineage, and the integrative quantitative perspective that connects volatility theory to live trading risk — closing the loop on a curriculum that no academic course and no retail platform can credibly assemble.

Hilton Fay

Course Director, The Chicago Derivatives Protocol
From the New York commodity rings to the Asian index desks — four decades and three continents trading the volatility curve.

Hilton Fay’s career began in the New York commodity pits at a time when membership on the floor was the only way to truly learn options. He started as a runner and clerk at Rudolf Wolff, moved into derivatives trading at Ronald A. Bernstein and Consensus Commodities Corp, and earned his seat as a member on four of New York’s principal exchanges — COMEX (gold, silver, copper), NYCE (cotton, orange juice, dollar index), NYMEX (natural gas), and the Coffee, Sugar and Cocoa Exchange (CSCE) — trading options across the entire commodity complex through the 1980s and into the early 1990s. It was on the CSCE floor in 1988 that Hilton first met Michael Hadley, then trading on the same exchange — the start of a working relationship that has spanned three decades and three continents, and that today reunites them as Course Directors of The Chicago Derivatives Protocol.

This is the foundation Hilton brings to The Chicago Derivatives Protocol: not a textbook understanding of skew, but the muscle memory of pricing the volatility curve in coffee, oil, sovereign debt, and indices through every regime — from open-outcry pits to electronic screens, across thirty-five years and three time zones.

The London Years: Sovereign Debt and Energy
In 1993 Hilton moved to London as a Senior Derivatives Trader for Cresvale, Refco Overseas, and Westminster Options. The Cresvale appointment came on the recommendation of Michael Hadley, by that time on Cresvale’s Singapore desk. On LIFFE he became one of the larger participants in BTP options, trading the volatility surface on Italian sovereign debt alongside Bund, Gilt, Euro Lira, and Euro Mark options. On the International Petroleum Exchange (IPE) he made markets in Brent Crude and Gas Oil options. His mandate from Cresvale — to qualify for membership on the Hong Kong Futures Exchange and trade the Hang Seng — opened the next chapter of his career.

It was during this London chapter that Hilton’s books came under the risk oversight of Santo Volpe — then Global Trading and Risk Manager at Refco — beginning a professional relationship that has continued for more than three decades. Santo, today his fellow Course Director at The Chicago Derivatives Protocol, considers Hilton among the finest options traders he has encountered in a forty-year career.

Hong Kong: Building a Desk Across Asia
From 1998 onward, based in Hong Kong, Hilton traded the full Asian index complex — Hang Seng, KOSPI, Nikkei 225, and TAIEX — through the migration of the Hang Seng from open outcry to fully electronic execution. As Senior Derivatives Trader at Vantage Derivatives he ran proprietary books trading the volatility curve and skew in the KOSPI and Nikkei, with full responsibility for pricing, hedging, and gamma management. He was given the mandate to establish Vantage Derivatives’ Hong Kong office, integrating execution, risk, and clearing across the region’s principal exchanges.

Aurora Partnership: The Volatility Curve, Codified

Today Hilton trades equity indices, individual stocks, currencies, and sovereign bonds from the UK as a Partner at Aurora Partnership, with a focus on vanilla and exotic options as well as binary and digital structures. His specialism — pricing the structure and trading the volatility curve and skew — sits at the centre of the Chicago Derivatives Protocol curriculum. Where most modern desks model the surface from screens and back-tested data, Hilton teaches it the way it was learned in the pits: by reading order flow, interpreting term structure in real time, and constructing positions whose payoff geometry survives every regime.

In The Chicago Derivatives Protocol, Hilton distils four decades of pit-traded options, sovereign-debt market making, Asian-index volatility trading, and contemporary screen execution into the curriculum — bringing the live-risk pedagogy that no academic course can replicate.

Michael Hadley

Course Director, The Chicago Derivatives Protocol
Michael Hadley began his trading career in 1987 on the floor of the Coffee, Sugar & Cocoa Exchange (CSCE) in New York, where he served as an options market maker for two of the exchange's principal trading firms — Mondo Trading and Consensus Trading. In that capacity he made markets in options on coffee, sugar and cocoa while simultaneously carrying and managing positions across a remarkably broad range of commodity markets including gold, silver, copper, WTI crude oil, unleaded gasoline and fuel oil. It was on the CSCE floor that Michael developed the market-maker's instinct that would define his career — the ability to price risk accurately, manage exposure across multiple positions simultaneously, and perform under pressure in some of the world's most volatile commodity markets.

In 1990, Michael moved to London to trade on the London International Financial Futures and Options Exchange (LIFFE), then at the height of its influence as one of the world's premier derivatives exchanges. There he traded options on German Bunds, Short Sterling and UK Gilts — three of the most technically demanding and heavily traded interest rate derivatives markets in existence — further broadening his expertise from commodity options into the complex world of fixed income derivatives.

In 1992, Michael relocated to Singapore and joined the Singapore International Monetary Exchange (SIMEX) — one of Asia's most significant and pioneering derivatives markets. He was among the first market makers in the Nikkei 225 options pit, a distinction that placed him at the forefront of Asia's emerging equity derivatives landscape at a time when the rules of the game were still being written. He went on to trade options on the Taiwan MSCI and the Singapore index, building a deep, multi-market expertise in Asian equity derivatives across nearly a decade on the SIMEX floor.

Such was the depth of Michael's expertise that SIMEX retained him as their exclusive trainer for new brokers and exchange members — a formal institutional endorsement that few practitioners in the region could claim. In that capacity he designed and delivered training programmes covering options theory, order execution, risk management, and exchange protocol, equipping an entire generation of Asian derivatives professionals with the foundational knowledge required to operate on one of Asia's most dynamic trading floors.

Following his years as a floor trader, Michael maintained active engagement with the markets and market participants while simultaneously building several successful business ventures in Singapore. He returned to institutional-grade trading in 2006 as a Senior Derivatives Trader with TransMarket Group LLC, where he was responsible for expanding the firm's trading operations across Asian equity index futures and options — including the Nikkei 225, TOPIX, KOSPI 200, MSCI, SiMSCI, Hang Seng, and Hang Seng China Enterprise options — while simultaneously developing inter-Asian equity volatility arbitrage and dispersion strategies and the proprietary risk management systems required to support them.

In 2010, Michael founded John Galt Trading Consultants, through which he continued to trade futures and options on Asian equity indexes as well as the precious metals markets — Gold, Silver, Platinum and Palladium — as both Senior Trader and Risk Manager until 2022.

With a trading career spanning nearly four decades across three continents and three of the world's most influential derivatives exchanges — the CSCE, LIFFE, and SIMEX — Michael's experience encompasses options market-making across soft commodities, energy, metals, fixed income and equity indexes. Few practitioners anywhere in the world can claim market-making credentials across such a breadth of asset classes and exchanges.

He now teaches financial instrument theory and applications with a specific focus on options — their structure, pricing, behaviour, and real-world application across multiple asset classes and market conditions. His curriculum is grounded not in textbook abstraction but in the lived experience of someone who has traded and made markets in options professionally through multiple market cycles, global crises, and periods of extreme volatility — and who was trusted by one of Asia's foremost derivatives exchanges to pass that knowledge on.

For serious students of the markets, there is no substitute for learning from someone who was there.

Matthias Knab

Founder & Publisher, The Chicago Derivatives Protocol
Three decades at the intersection of finance, technology and institutional publishing — the founder of one of the most established information networks in alternative investments and family offices, and the architectural partner of The Chicago Derivatives Protocol.
Matthias Knab is the Founder and CEO of Opalesque, the publishing house specialising in alternative investments and family offices since 2003. With a global team of journalists, analysts and experts, Opalesque produces newsletters, videos, roundtables, research, webinars and podcasts that reach over 90,000 users in 160 countries, including HORIZONS: Family Office & Investor Magazine — the world’s largest quality family-office and investor publication. Across more than 35 years in finance, Matthias has interviewed many of the most influential investors and asset managers in the industry, moderated 400+ panels at 250+ conferences, hosted 200+ webinars and podcasts, edited more than 27,000 articles on alternative investments, judged dozens of pitch competitions, analysed over 5,000 pitch decks, and helped fund managers raise billions in assets.

This is the foundation Matthias brings to The Chicago Derivatives Protocol: the publishing reach, institutional credibility and distribution architecture that ensure the work of the four Course Directors meets the audience it deserves — the high / ultra high net-worth individuals, family offices, allocators, fund managers, institutional desks who deploy derivatives as instruments of risk, return, and portfolio architecture.

From the trading academy to the founding of Opalesque

Matthias began his career in the late 1980s in information technology and consulting at Generali and later Allianz, two of the largest insurance groups in continental Europe, where he spent more than a decade running large-scale operations and managing the IT and billing systems handling hundreds of thousands of clients and hundreds of millions of Deutschmarks in monthly premia.

In 1999 he moved into financial-markets education as CEO of Börsenakademie AG, a Munich-based stock-market academy where he built and ran training modules for trading and investing — a structural precedent for what he is now building, on a far larger scale, with The Chicago Derivatives Protocol. During this period he earned two Chartered Institute for Securities & Investment (CISI) qualifications — the Securities Representative (May 2000) and the Futures & Options Representative (June 2000) — alongside the Xetra Funktionales Member Training of the Deutsche Börse Group. He then served as Director at TradeStream Global AG (2001–2003), responsible for the international distribution of global electronic trading applications.

In February 2003 he launched the Opalesque Alternative Market Briefing — the first daily internet-based news service focused on hedge funds and alternative investments — and built around it, over two decades, what is today one of the most established information networks in the field.

In 2024 he became Group CEO of Fundmanager.tools, the digital training and asset-raising platform built on the Opalesque infrastructure. As one of ten VIP tutors of the Opalesque Digital Master Class, he and his colleagues codified more than two decades of asset-raising and business-building practice into a structured curriculum of 27 videos, 92 workbook pages and 54 Guerrilla Tactics — a direct sibling, in form and method, to the educational architecture of The Chicago Derivatives Protocol.

Senior advisory at the institutional edge of alternative investments

Matthias serves in a number of senior advisory and board roles spanning the institutional and emerging segments of alternative investments:

  • Senior Advisor at Castle Hall, where he contributes to the expansion of the firm’s DiligenceExchange platform — the industry-standard infrastructure for verified due-diligence data, supporting investors across 5,000+ funds and $10 trillion in assets;

  • Senior Advisor to the Greenwich Economic Forum, the geo-economics conference at the intersection of geopolitics, economics and global investments;

  • Member of the Executive Council at Mintus, the first UK-regulated platform fractionalising access to multi-million-dollar artworks by artists such as Andy Warhol and George Condo;

The Chicago Derivatives Protocol

In The Chicago Derivatives Protocol, Matthias serves as Founder and Publisher alongside the four Course Directors of Aurora Partnership. His role is the architectural and institutional counterpart to the directors’ teaching faculty: building the platform, structuring the certification ecosystem, and connecting the curriculum to the Opalesque global audience of family offices, allocators and institutional investors.
It is also the natural extension of a career thesis Matthias has built across three decades — that financial education at its best is rigorously sourced, durably published, and institutionally serious rather than retail noise. The Chicago Derivatives Protocol applies that thesis to the most structurally complex segment of the institutional toolkit: the volatility surface, the convertible bond, and the live-risk hedging architecture of the professional desk.