Daniel Sullivan spent nearly four decades in the financial industry, starting on the Philadelphia Stock Exchange at 18 years old before moving through the Chicago Board of Trade, the CBOE, and eventually high frequency arbitrage trading. His father and two brothers combined for over a century on the trading floors, and Sullivan himself worked the pits for roughly two decades before transitioning upstairs as electronic trading took over. Recruited into options trading by a young Jeff Yass, Sullivan later ran his own brokerage with his father before turning to storytelling. He now has close to seven film and TV projects in development, including a docuseries called The Floor, a reality series called The Day Trader, and his passion project, a film called The Opening Bell, modeled after Yellowstone with the trading floor as the central character. Sullivan discusses the discipline and camaraderie of pit trading, the forces that killed open outcry, and his journey toward funding and producing his stories, which blend fictional characters with real trading floor history.
A 40-year trading floor veteran on turning pit trading chaos and Jeff Yass stories into film and TV.
How did you get started on the trading floor?
My father worked on the Midwest Stock Exchange and moved us to Philadelphia. I wasn't the best student, so I graduated high school on a Friday and started on the Philadelphia options floor that Monday. My two older brothers were already there. Combined, they had close to 70 to 75 years on the floor. We were bred for it.
What was it like walking onto the Philadelphia Stock Exchange for the first time in 1979?
I was extremely intimidated, scared, nervous, all of it. It was about 95 percent men at the time, which made it even more intense. My job was simple, running tickets to brokers in the pit. There's no way to describe the intimidation for an 18 year old, but looking back it was amazing being on the floor.
It was Jeff Yass who recruited you. What was he like back then?
I was 19 or 20. Jeff and his group came from New York, former professional poker players who saw the opportunity in options right as it was taking off. He's brilliant and one of the nicest guys I've ever met. He and his partners did complex trades like reversals and conversions entirely in their head while everyone else used calculators. Today he's worth 45 to 50 billion and is the richest person in Pennsylvania.
What's the biggest lesson you learned from your time on the floor that still applies today?
It's controlling what I call the juice, which is discipline. If you can't control your discipline, you'll never succeed as a trader. I also talk about revenge trading, where you get upset after a loss and put on a trade just to make your money back with no real reason. The traders who succeed are the ones who know when to walk away from the desk.
What was lost when the trading floors disappeared?
The camaraderie. Real estate in the pit was everything, and there was a code, your word was your bond. If I said I did 100 contracts at a certain price, that was written in stone. It was a family. Even now, if I'm at a bar, I'll spend 99 percent of my time talking to someone who worked the floor over an upstairs trader.
What ultimately killed the trading floor?
It came down to speed and rates. Commissions dropped from around a dollar a contract down to a quarter, so the cushion for covering errors shrank. Electronic trading gave instant fills instead of working an order through the pit and waiting for confirmation. Speed and shrinking rates are really what destroyed the floor.
At what point did you realize these stories needed to be told through film and TV?
I was watching Life Below Zero and thought, why not take that format of following five people and apply it to trading instead of survival in Alaska? That's how the idea started, and eventually I built out a film called The Opening Bell, a reality series called The Day Trader, and a docuseries called The Floor, starting with the Chicago Board of Trade.
Tell us about The Opening Bell. Where did that story come from?
It's fictional but built from real stories and real people, just not their real names, woven into the script. I modeled it on Yellowstone, where the ranch is really the main character. Here the trading floor plays that role, with storylines branching out from it. It's loosely based on my own family, including my mother adopting a daughter because she couldn't have a fifth child.
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