Part 1 Why firms merge: recent history of M&A waves M&A personae creative financing - the new techniques corporate control and expansion via M taxation, deregulation and antitrust legislation merger waves - a cyclical dynamic approach. Part 2 Checklist review of the literature: a checklist of causes - why firms merge a checklist of effects - post-acquisition outcomes a checklist of success and failure factors.

This article tests for the relations between trading volume and subsequent returns patterns in individual securities' short-horizon returns that are suggested by such articles as L. Blume, D. Easley, and M. O'Hara (1994) and J. Y. Campbell, S. J. Grossman, and J. Wang (1993). Using a variant of B. Lehmann's (1990) contrarian trading strategy, the authors find strong evidence of a relation between trading activity and subsequent autocovariances in weekly returns. Specifically, high-transaction securities experience price reversals, while the returns of low-transactions securities are positively autocovarying. Overall, information on trading activity appears to be an important predictor of the returns of individual securities.

This article tests for the relations between trading volume and subsequent returns patterns in individual securities' short-horizon returns that are suggested by such articles as Blume, Easley, and O'Hara (1994) and Campbell, Grossman, and Wang (1993). Using a variant of Lehmann's (1990) contrarian trading strategy, we find strong evidence of a relation between trading activity and subsequent autocovariances in weekly returns. Specifically, high-transaction securities experience price reversals, while the returns of low-transactions securities are positively autocovarying. Overall, information on trading activity appears to be an important predictor of the returns of individual securities.

This article tests for the relations between trading volume and subsequent returns patterns in individual securities' short‐horizon returns that are suggested by such articles as Blume, Easley, and O'Hara (1994) and Campbell, Grossman, and Wang (1993) . Using a variant of Lehmann's (1990) contrarian trading strategy, we find strong evidence of a relation between trading activity and subsequent autocovariances in weekly returns. Specifically, high‐transaction securities experience price reversals, while the returns of low‐transactions securities are positively autocovarying. Overall, information on trading activity appears to be an important predictor of the returns of individual securities.