The purpose of this paper is to extend the literature on the comparative performance of mutual and stock retail banks by examining a unique episode in the history of financial services; namely, when four of the largest UK building societies (accounting for approximately 60 per cent of the...

This paper shows that short horizon stock returns can be predicted to a much greater degree by past price movements than would be anticipated given their low autocorrelation. This raises doubts over the reliability of the autocorrelation statistic as a measure of stock market predictability.