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4 Stocks With Increasing Cash Flows to Enrich Your Portfolio

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Cash is the most essential factor for any company. In fact, it is the lifeblood for the company’s existence, development and success. Cash gives strength and vitality to a company, flexibility to make decisions, the means to make potential investments and the fuel to run its growth engine.

Even a profit-making company can end up being bankrupt while meeting its obligations if it has a dearth of cash flow. A company’s resilience can be effectively judged by evaluating its efficiency in generating cash flows, as cash not only guards a company from market mayhem but also indicates that profits are being channelized in the right direction.

To understand this efficiency, one needs to consider a company’s net cash flow. In any business, cash moves in and out, net cash flow explains how much money the company is actually making. Experiencing a positive cash flow denotes an increase in the company’s liquid assets. This provides the means to meet debt obligations, shell out for expenses, reinvest in business, endure downturns and finally return wealth to shareholders. On the other hand, incurring negative cash flow indicates a decline in the company’s liquidity, which in turn lowers its flexibility to support these moves.

However, positive cash flow alone is not sufficient to predict a company’s future growth. Consistent growth can only be achieved by a company when this positive cash flow is increasing because this improvement indicates management’s efficiency in regulating its cash movements and lesser dependency on external financing sources for running its business.

As a result, while picking stocks, go beyond profits and make sure to look for companies with dependable and increasing cash flows.

Screening Parameters:

To find out 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.

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 screens out the 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 individual industry categories.

Here are four of the seven stocks that made it through the screen:

Autobytel Inc. owns Internet sites for new and pre-owned vehicle information and automotive services that link buyers and sellers throughout the United States in an information-rich environment. Through the company's websites consumers can research pricing, specifications and other information regarding new and pre-owned vehicles and purchase, finance, lease, insure, sell or maintain their vehicles. The company is headquartered in Irvine, CA. It came up with an earnings surprise of 70.0% in the latest reported quarter and has an average surprise of 20.36% over the trailing four quarters.The company has a VGM score of “A”.

TDK Corporation (TTDKY - Free Report) is a Tokyo-based manufacturer and seller of electronic components. The company has a VGM score of “A”.

KT Corp. (KT - Free Report) , headquartered in Seongnam, South Korea, provides telecommunication services. Its services include mobile telecommunications services, telephone services, fixed-line and VoIP telephone services. The company also provides interconnection services to other telecommunications companies, broadband Internet access services and Internet-related services. It also offers information technology and network services, including consulting, designing, building, and maintaining of systems and communication networks. The company has a VGM score of “A”.

Hallador Energy Company , through its wholly owned subsidiary, Sunrise Coal, LLC, is engaged in the production of coal in the Illinois Basin for the electric power generation industry. The company is headquartered in Denver, CO and has 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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