Patterns in Three Centuries of Sock Market Prices
William N. Goetzmann

This article applies autoregression and rescaled range statistics to very long stock market series to test the hypothesis that long-term temporal dependencies are present in financial data. For the annual capital appreciation returns to the London Stock Exchange, evidence of persistence in raw returns greater than 5 years and of mean reversion in deviations from rolling 20-year averages is found. Similar patterns are observed for the NewYork Stock Exchange; however, they are not significant at traditional confidence levels.