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4 Stocks With Rising Cash Flows to Buy This Thanksgiving Week

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Cash is the lifeblood of a company’s existence, development and success. It gives strength and vitality to a company, the flexibility to make decisions, the means to make potential investments and the fuel to run its growth engine. Thus, cash indicates a company’s true financial health.

In this regard, stocks like HNI Corporation (HNI - Free Report) , H&E Equipment Services, Inc. (HEES - Free Report) , Perdoceo Education Corporation (PRDO - Free Report) and Limbach Holdings, Inc. (LMB - Free Report) are worth buying.

Investors flock to companies that earn profits, but even a profitable business can succumb to failure if its cash flow is uneven and eventually file for bankruptcy. However, one can effectively judge a company’s resilience by evaluating its power of generating cash flows. This is because cash not only guards a company from market mayhem but also indicates that profits are being channeled in the right direction.

Moreover, amid uncertainties in the global economy, market disruptions and dislocations, as well as liquidity concerns, analyzing a company’s cash-generating efficiency holds more relevance.

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.

Therefore, 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 5-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 our four picks out of the 13 stocks that qualified the screening:

HNI Corporation provides products and solutions for home and workplace environments. HNI is a leading global provider and designer of office furniture and the leading manufacturer and marketer of hearth products.

The Zacks Consensus Estimate for HNI Corporation’s 2023 earnings per share has been revised 11.1% upward to $2.40 in the past month. HNI has a VGM Score of A.

H&E Equipment Services is one of the largest integrated equipment services companies in the United States. The company is focused on heavy construction & industrial equipment as well as rents, sells and provides parts & service support to the four core categories of specialized equipment. These are hi-lift or aerial platform equipment, cranes, earthmoving equipment & industrial lift trucks.

The Zacks Consensus Estimate for H&E Equipment Services’ current-year earnings has been revised upward by 4.2% in the past month to $4.50 per share. HEES currently has a VGM Score of A.

Perdoceo Education provides educational services. PRDO offers bachelor's, associate and non-degree programs in information technologies, visual communication and design technologies, business studies and culinary arts.

The Zacks Consensus Estimate for Perdoceo Education’s current-year earnings has been revised upward by 9.6% in the past month to $2.06 per share. PRDO currently has a VGM Score of B.

Limbach Holdings provides building systems. The company engineers, constructs and services mechanical, plumbing, air conditioning, heating, building automation, electrical and control systems.

The Zacks Consensus Estimate for Limbach Holdings’s 2023 earnings has moved 28.7% north in the past month to $1.75 per share. LMB sports a VGM Score of A.

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Disclosure: Officers, directors and/or employees of Zacks Investment Research may own or have sold short securities and/or hold long and/or short positions in options that are mentioned in this material. An affiliated investment advisory firm may own or have sold short securities and/or hold long and/or short positions in options that are mentioned in this material.

Disclosure: Performance information for Zacks’ portfolios and strategies are available at: https://www.zacks.com/performance.

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