During the 1940s Jones worked for Fortune magazine and wrote articles on non-financial subjects such as Atlantic convoys, farm cooperatives, and boys' prep schools. In March 1949, Jones was investigating technical methods of market analysis for an article titled "Fashions in Forecasting", reporting on a new class of stock-market timers and the approaches they employed to call the market. He studied a dozen or so of these "technicians", whose approaches ranged from volume/price ratios to odd-lot statistics to the outcome of the Harvard–Yale football game.