After earning a BA in finance from the University of Texas at Austin in 1972, James H, Jones' next scheduled stop was law school. But Jones, who had traded stocks since high school, made one last push to find a job with a stock brokerage. Each turned him down because of his lack of sales experience. But a friend landed a job at Clayton Brokerage Co. in Houston and urged him to apply. Jones packed the car, then found out that Clayton had an office in his home town of Dallas. "I'd stop by there and just see; and there was this office that was just booming," Jones recalls. He talked his way in and spent the next 12 years with Clayton, a boutique commodity brokerage known for its research. While Jones is now a technical trader, he didn't start out that way and says he only really began to understand the markets after he went bust. "I had just started in the business and I was long coffee and got caught in nine consecutive limit down days," he says. And while it left him unable to trade his own account for almost four years, he says he spent the time studying the markets and discovering technical analysis. "The fundamentals may be right, but in order to make money, you have to use the technicals," Jones says.
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