  A new family of nonparametric statistics, the r-statistics, is introduced. It
consists of counting the number of records of the cumulative sum of the sample.
The single-sample r-statistic is almost as powerful as Student's t-statistic
for Gaussian and uniformly distributed variables, and more powerful than the
sign and Wilcoxon signed-rank statistics as long as the data are not too
heavy-tailed.
  Three two-sample parametric r-statistics are proposed, one with a higher
specificity but a smaller sensitivity than Mann-Whitney U-test and the other
one a higher sensitivity but a smaller specificity. A nonparametric two-sample
r-statistic is introduced, whose power is very close to that of Welch statistic
for Gaussian or uniformly distributed variables.
