Look Beyond Profit, Buy These 4 Stocks With Increasing Cash Flows

If achieving profit is a company’s goal, then having a healthy cash flow is essential for its existence, development and success. Cash offers the company flexibility to make decisions, the means to make investments, the fuel to run its growth engine, and can, indeed, be called the lifeblood of any business.

In this regard, stocks like Tutor Perini Corporation TPC, National Energy Services Reunited Corp. NESR, Huron Consulting Group Inc. HURN and RCM Technologies, Inc. RCMT are worth buying.

Often, investors flock to companies with solid top-line growth and increasing profit numbers. However, even a profit-making company can have a dearth of cash flow and face bankruptcy while meeting its obligations. 

To invest in the right stocks, one must go beyond profit numbers and look at a company’s efficiency in generating cash flows because cash not only guards it from market mayhem but also suggests that profits are being channeled in the right direction. Cash indicates a company’s true financial health. This holds more relevance in today’s world amid uncertainties in the global economy, market disruptions and dislocations, as well as liquidity concerns.

To figure out this efficiency, one needs to consider a company’s net cash flow. While in any business, cash moves in and out, it is net cash flow that explains how much money a company is actually generating.

If a company is experiencing a positive cash flow, it denotes an increase in its liquid assets, which gives it the means to meet debt obligations, shell out for expenses, reinvest in the business, endure downturns and finally return wealth to shareholders. On the other hand, a negative cash flow indicates a decline in the company’s liquidity, which, in turn, lowers its flexibility to support these moves.

However, having a positive cash flow merely does not secure a company’s future growth. To ride on the growth curve, a company must have its cash flow increasing because that indicates management’s efficiency in regulating its cash movements and less dependency on outside financing for running its business.

Keep yourself abreast with the following screen to bet on stocks with rising cash flows.

Screening Parameters:

To find stocks that have seen increasing cash flow over time, we ran the screen for those whose cash flow in the latest reported quarter was at least equal to or greater than the five-year average cash flow per common share. This implies a positive trend and increasing cash over a period of time.

In addition to this, we chose:

Zacks Rank 1: No matter whether market conditions are good or bad, stocks with a Zacks Rank #1 (Strong Buy) have a proven history of outperformance. You can see the complete list of today’s Zacks #1 Rank stocks here.

Average Broker Rating 1: This indicates that brokers are also highly hopeful about the company’s future performance.

Current Price greater than or equal to $5: This sieves out low-priced stocks.

VGM Score of B or better: This score is also of great assistance in selecting stocks. Importantly, this scoring system helps in picking winning stocks in their industry categories.

Here are four out of the eight stocks that qualified the screening:

Tutor Perini provides diversified general contracting, construction management and design-build services to private clients and public agencies worldwide. 

The Zacks Consensus Estimate for Tutor Perini’s 2026 revenues indicates an improvement of 14% from the prior-year reported numbers. The Zacks Consensus Estimate for TPC’s 2026 earnings has been revised 5.8% upward over the past 30 days. TPC currently has a VGM Score of A.

National Energy Services is one of the largest national oilfield services providers in the MENA and Asia Pacific regions. NESR helps its customers unlock the full potential of their reservoirs by providing Production Services such as Cementing, Coiled Tubing, Filtration, Completions, Stimulation and Fracturing, and Nitrogen Services. 

The Zacks Consensus Estimate for National Energy Services’ 2026 earnings has improved 4.6% over the past 30 days to $1.82. NESR currently has a VGM Score of A.

Huron Consulting provides financial and operational consulting services. The company's experienced and credentialed professionals employ their expertise in accounting, finance, economics and operations to a wide variety of both financially sound and distressed organizations. 

The Zacks Consensus Estimate for Huron Consulting’s 2026 earnings has moved upward by 2% to $9.18 per share over the past 30 days. HURN has a VGM Score of B.

RCM Technologies is a national provider of business, technology and resource solutions in information technology and professional engineering to customers in corporate and government sectors. 

The Zacks Consensus Estimate for RCM Technologies’ 2026 earnings has moved northward by 13.3% to $3.07 per share over the past 30 days. RCMT has a VGM Score of A.

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This article originally published on Zacks Investment Research (zacks.com).

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