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5 Stocks With Swelling Cash Flows to Add to Your Portfolio

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Cash is the lifeblood for 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, thereby indicating a company’s true financial health.

Obviously, 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. But 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 channelized in the right direction.

To find this efficiency, one needs to consider a company’s net cash flow figure. 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 then it denotes an increase in its liquid assets, which gives it 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, 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 individual industry categories.

Here are five out of 16 stocks that qualified the screening:

Headquartered in Evansville, IN, Shoe Carnival, Inc. (SCVL - Free Report) offers a broad assortment of moderately priced dresses, casual and athletic footwear for men, women and children with emphasis on national and regional brands. The stock has a VGM Score of A. The company’s expected earnings growth for fiscal 2019 is 10.33%. Moreover, the Zacks Consensus Estimate for fiscal 2019 bottom line has inched 1.5% up in the last 60 days.

Fremont, CA-headquartered SYNNEX Corporation (SNX - Free Report) is a business process services company, offering a wide-range of distribution, logistics and integration services to the technology industry. The company also offers outsourced services dedicated to customer engagement to a wide array of enterprises. The stock has a VGM Score of A. The company’s expected earnings growth for fiscal 2019 is 8.45%. The Zacks Consensus Estimate for fiscal 2019 earnings per share has increased 1.2% over the last 60 days.

Domiciled in St. George, UT, SkyWest, Inc. (SKYW - Free Report) is the holding company for SkyWest Airlines and an aircraft leasing company. SkyWest provides commercial air service in cities throughout North America. The stock has a VGM Score of A. The company’s expected earnings growth for the current year is 9.06%. The Zacks Consensus Estimate for current-year earnings has been revised 5.1% upward in the last 30 days.

Middlefield Banc Corp. (MBCN - Free Report) , headquartered in Middlefield, OH, is the bank holding company for The Middlefield Banking Company, which offers a range of banking products and services. The stock has a VGM Score of B. The company’s projected growth rate for the current year is 10.7%. The Zacks Consensus Estimate for the current year has improved 6% over the last 60 days.

SP Plus Corporation (SP - Free Report) , based in Chicago, IL, provides professional parking, ground transportation, facility maintenance, security and event logistics services to property owners and managers in all markets of the real estate industry. The stock has a VGM Score of A. The Zacks Consensus Estimate for full-year 2019 earnings climbed 0.4% in a week’s time.

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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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