About

Most options traders manage risk trade by trade. Ad Astra Trading was built on a different premise: that the principles institutional risk managers use to govern large, complex portfolios can be applied to individual options trading to produce clearer decisions, better structure, and long-term consistency.

That premise is the foundation of the Ad Astra Options Risk Framework.

The Background

Chris Landry spent the first decade of his career as a safety and soundness bank examiner for the State of Kansas, evaluating whether financial institutions had the risk governance infrastructure to survive adverse conditions. The second decade was spent inside a publicly traded bank as Director of Enterprise Risk Management, building and maintaining the frameworks that governed how the institution identified, measured, and controlled risk.

Most options educators are traders who became teachers. Chris is a risk professional who became a trader, and that difference shapes everything here.

Ad Astra Trading was built to transfer that institutional knowledge to individual traders. The same governance principles used inside regulated financial institutions, now applied to a single options trading account.

The Framework

The Ad Astra Options Risk Framework is a 12-module system that applies enterprise risk management principles to options trading. It is not a strategy. It is the governance layer that sits beneath your strategy, connecting individual trade decisions to portfolio-level objectives, risk appetite, and long-term goals.

Each module builds on the last. The workbooks produce output artifacts you keep and revisit. The tools make the concepts operational on a per-trade and weekly basis. The courses bring it all together.

The goal is not to predict markets. It is to make decisions that hold up regardless of what markets do.

Who This Is For

This framework is built for options traders who understand the mechanics but keep experiencing avoidable losses. Not from bad trades, but from misaligned size, structure, or market regime. Traders who know what went wrong. Who lack the system to prevent it from happening again.

If you are looking for trade signals, stock picks, or strategy mechanics, this is not the right place. If you are looking for the operating system that governs whether you should be trading at all; in what size, with what structures, and under what conditions; you are in the right place.

The Philosophy

Survival first. Returns second.

Risk is not something to minimize. It is something to understand, define, and manage with intention. A trader who survives long enough, with a process intact, compounds. A trader without a process eventually does not.

The foundational essays on Substack are free and always will be. The workbooks, tools, and courses are for traders who want to put the framework into practice.

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