The cash flow statement has considered as an important and a suitable statement for economic decision-making, in addition to, this statement provided an importance of the information, which reflects the interest of financial analysts in its numbers. Therefore, this study aimed to show the importance of the information content of the cash flows statement, and testing the relationship between each of the cash flows (operating- financing- investment) and stocks returns. This study has applied on the insurance companies that listed in the Damascus Stocks Exchange from 1/10/2006 to 31/12/2010, in order to test the relationship between their cash flows and stocks returns. The study found many important results: The financial analysts interesting in the numbers of cash flow, as it is less vulnerable to distortion of the other financial statements numbers especially the income statement. The IAS (7) noted that the most of the companies prefer to accordance the cash flow statement with the direct method that it has provided information that is more useful and disclosures in the decision-making process. When applying the study on the statement of insurance companies that listed in the DSE the relationship between stock returns and cash flows of these companies have ranged between presence of a statistically significant relationship (either direct correlation or inverse) and the lack of a statistically significant. The study concluded many of the recommendations that researcher believes that they may be useful in interest of cash flows statement and their uses and analysis.
Keywords: Cash flows, Informational content, Stock returns
