Jason Sen – Background, Career & Methodology
Jason Sen's 35 year career so far:
12 years on the LIFFE trading floor (from 1987).
3 years options market making when trading went digital.
5 years derivatives broking (investment bank clients).
15 years providing technical analysis & signals to investment banks and retail traders.
10 years trading Forex, gold & index futures (personal account).
20 years of teaching traders.
He has posted his trade ideas on leading financial websites such as Investing.com & FXStreet.com for over 10 years and has been interviewed on many YouTube trading channels.
I began my trading career on the London Traded Options Market (LTOM) in April of 1987 at the age of 19.
This was situated on the London Stock Exchange floor, which in 1986 had been emptied of stock brokers as they were known then, due to the deregulation of financial markets dubbed ‘Big Bang’. Stock trading had gone electronic so the only open outcry market on that floor was for traded options.
I had been offered a job as a ‘Blue Button’ clerk at a big stock broker, Sheppards and Chase as they were known then. I was not allowed to trade but was allowed to answer the phones and take orders.
However the market was growing at such a rapid pace that I was quickly trained as a ‘dealer’ and passed my trading exam. I was given a brightly coloured trading jacket to distinguish my company and then sent in to the ‘pits’ to execute small orders. This was probably the most nerve wracking experience of my life, up until that stage at least.

Entering a pit to be confronted by very loud, confident and intimidating market makers shouting prices at me, frightened me so much that I would visibly shake. I could hardly speak, let alone make a mental note of who made what price. I would often turn around and walk out without trading.
No doubt this amused the market makers no end, whose job it was to intimidate you in to trading with them so that they could turn a quick profit. Eventually I grew in confidence, enough to do my job properly at least. Just at that time the 1987 October crash happened.
The stock market fell about 50% in less than a week.
It was incredibly exciting and we were so busy that we could not fill every order by the close.
We would have a huge back log but I loved the buzz. Then business began to grind down in to the end of the year as the repercussions of the crash hit us. Redundancy hit and I lost my job just before Christmas. I had enjoyed my taste of open out-cry markets and knew I wanted to continue in the City and build a career but how was I supposed to do this when there were massive redundancies and no one was hiring, least of all someone with barely any experience such as I? Somehow I got lucky and the successful boss of a privately owned Dutch market making company hired me.
