What if the best time to buy a stock was the stretch when it looked most boring, or even broken? 👀

Today we look at Tutor Perini (TPC), a construction company that went from two years of losses to a record quarter and a $19.9 billion backlog, and why a steady $500 a month through the dull years mattered more than timing the turn.

Read through to the end — the framework at the close is the part most busy investors can reuse every week.

"The secret of getting ahead is getting started."

— Mark Twain

A fixed $500 a month is that start, repeated: you add in the dull stretch instead of waiting for the chart to look obvious.

Tutor Perini Corp. $TPC ( ▲ 0.78% ) closed at $84.36. Five years earlier it was about $13.00. That is a +$71.36 move, or +548.92% in total — roughly 45%/yr on average if you held the whole stretch. That pace is unusual. It is not a forecast, and it is a poor default to project forward blindly.

Look for on the chart: the 2022–2023 dip and base, the 2024–2026 climb toward the $102.30 52-week high, and the pullback to $84.36 (52-week low $57.90) — DCA would have bought more shares in the early years and fewer into the late strength.

Lesson: Buy the boring years. Most of this five-year gain came after 2023, when the stock closed near $5 and the chart looked broken. Even now it sits about 17% below the $102.30 high. Past results never guarantee the future, and a 45%/yr average is history, not a rate you can book again.

Next Horizon: another verified 5-year chart, same $500/month frame, same honest catch.

Want a cleaner look at this name? Open TPC on Snowball Analytics — price, fundamentals, and history in one place. Context for the chart above, not a buy signal.

A five-year chart like Tutor Perini’s can make the whole thing look obvious.

It was not. Five years ago the shares traded around $13. In the spring of 2023 they closed near $5. At the $84.36 close in the 5-Year Horizon above, the stock was up roughly 549% over five years, even after a pullback from its August high.

A better question than “Did I miss it?” is: What does this business actually do, what changed after the boring years, and how would a steady investor handle a stock like this?

Most of this gain came after a long stretch when the stock looked dull, or worse. That is the stretch most people skip.

Here is how $TPC ( ▲ 0.78% ) breaks down.

Tutor Perini is not a household name. It is a large construction company that builds big, complex public and private projects.

The company describes itself as a civil, building, and specialty construction company that has provided construction services since 1894. It works for public agencies and private customers, and it often handles major parts of a job with its own crews, including excavation, concrete, steel erection, electrical, mechanical, plumbing, and HVAC work.

It reports three segments. Civil is heavy infrastructure, such as mass transit and bridges. Building covers projects such as healthcare, education, hospitality and gaming, and government facilities. Specialty Contractors handles trade work such as electrical and mechanical systems.

Civil is the profit engine. In the second quarter of 2026, Civil brought in about $816 million of the company’s $1.64 billion in revenue and about $125 million of its roughly $162 million in segment operating income before corporate costs.

In plain English: when a transit agency, a state, or the military needs a very large project built, Tutor Perini is one of the firms that can bid on it.

The first part of this five-year chart was hard to own.

Tutor Perini lost $210.0 million in 2022 and another $171.2 million in 2023. The company tied those results to adverse legal judgments, settlements, and write-downs on disputed legacy projects.

The stock reflected it. After starting this five-year window around $13, TPC closed at about $5.06 in April 2023.

But something useful was happening under the losses. In 2023 the company generated a record $308.5 million of operating cash flow, helped by collections on resolved claims, and it ended the year with a backlog of about $10.2 billion, up 28%.

That is what a boring year can look like from the inside: messy headlines on top, cleanup and new work underneath.

The run came from two things happening at once: the old disputes faded, and the new work turned out to be more profitable.

Backlog roughly doubled, from about $10.2 billion at the end of 2023 to $19.9 billion at June 30, 2026. According to Zacks, that backlog includes nine megaprojects valued at roughly $16 billion.

Management says its pipeline of potential projects over the next three to four years totals more than $200 billion, about three times larger than a couple of years ago. It points to well-funded state, local, and federal customers with large infrastructure projects planned, plus commercial customers in healthcare, education, and hospitality and gaming.

When investors start to believe a company’s problems are behind it and years of work are already booked, they tend to re-rate the stock quickly. TPC went from about $9 at the start of 2024 to about $67 at the end of 2025.

The recent results show why investors paid up.

For the second quarter of 2026, Tutor Perini reported record revenue of $1.64 billion, up 19% from $1.37 billion a year earlier. All three segments grew: Civil up 11%, Building up 21%, and Specialty Contractors up 47%.

Income from construction operations hit a record $117.7 million, up 54%. Diluted EPS was $1.23, compared with $0.38 a year earlier.

Cash flow was strong too. Operating cash flow for the first half of 2026 was a record $334.1 million, and cash exceeded total debt by $542 million at June 30.

Management raised its 2026 adjusted EPS guidance to $5.15 to $5.45, up from $4.90 to $5.30, and said it expects 2027 adjusted EPS to be substantially higher than the top of that range.

Those are real numbers from a real business. But guidance is a forecast, not a promise, and a strong quarter does not stop a stock from falling.

Tutor Perini reports two EPS numbers, and the gap between them matters.

Its adjusted EPS of $1.74 in the second quarter excludes share-based compensation. Some of the company’s long-term incentive awards pay out based on the stock price, so when the stock rises, that expense can rise with it.

In the second quarter, share-based compensation was $27.9 million, down from $55.4 million a year earlier. The company expects that expense to decline much more significantly in 2027, as most of the remaining awards vest by the end of 2026.

Neither number is wrong. Just know which one you are looking at when someone quotes a P/E ratio.

Alongside the results, the board raised the quarterly dividend 50%, from $0.06 to $0.09 per share, or $0.36 a year.

The company also bought back 137,374 shares in the second quarter for $10 million, at an average price of $72.78, and had $170 million left under its repurchase program.

Both are signs of confidence in cash flow. But at $84.36, $0.36 a year is a yield of well under 1%. Nobody owns TPC for the income today.

Here is the part a five-year return hides.

TPC hit an intraday 52-week high of $102.30 on August 6, 2026, the day after its second-quarter report. At $84.36, it was about 17.5% below that peak, only weeks later.

That is a modest fade next to a five-year run like this, but someone who bought near the top is still sitting on a paper loss, even though the company just posted record results.

Valuation is part of the reason. At $84.36, the stock trades at roughly 16 times the midpoint of management’s 2026 adjusted EPS guidance, but around 36 times trailing GAAP earnings, according to Simply Wall St. After a run this large, a lot of good news is already in the price.

The 52-week low was $57.90 in November 2025. That one-year range shows how much the price can move while the business story stays roughly the same.

Tutor Perini’s backlog leans on a relatively small number of very large projects.

That can be great when those jobs ramp up together. It can also make results lumpy when a project is delayed, disputed, or changes scope. The 2022 and 2023 losses are a reminder of what happens when disputes go the wrong way.

The company’s own list of risks includes revisions of cost estimates, litigation and dispute outcomes, delays in government spending, customer cancellations or scope reductions on backlog, and the ability to obtain bonding.

Backlog also needs refilling. It slipped from $20.6 billion at the end of 2025 to $19.9 billion at June 30, 2026, because the company worked through more revenue than it booked in new awards during the first half.

None of that means the business is weak. It means the stock can swing hard on news about just a handful of projects.

This is where the $500-a-month habit earns its place.

A fixed monthly amount buys more shares when the price is low and fewer when it is high. With TPC, $500 bought about 38 shares at $13.00, roughly 99 shares near $5.06 in 2023, about 5.9 shares at $84.36, and only about 4.9 shares at the $102.30 high.

That is the quiet advantage of dollar-cost averaging. You do not need to know when a turnaround will start. The schedule keeps you buying through the stretch when the chart looks dull or broken.

Waiting for the chart to look obvious works the other way. By the time TPC looked like a clear winner, $500 bought a small fraction of the shares it bought in 2023.

A steady plan does not remove losses. In 2022 and 2023 it would have meant watching your account shrink for a while. It just keeps one scary stretch from stopping you.

The opposite mistake is just as common.

After a strong run and a pullback, some investors decide to wait for the “right” moment: one more dip, one more quarter, one more clear signal.

The problem is that the perfect entry is only obvious in hindsight. Waiting can mean sitting in cash through the next leg up, or never starting at all.

A monthly schedule handles both problems at once. It stops you from chasing the high, and it stops you from freezing after the drop.

The important part is choosing an amount and a position size you could hold through another stretch like 2022 and 2023, because this stock has already shown it can deliver one.

The Bottom Line

Tutor Perini’s business story is real: record revenue, record operating income, record first-half cash flow, a $19.9 billion backlog, and a rising dividend.

The hard years were real too. Two years of losses and a share price near $5 came before the roughly 549% five-year gain.

Both facts belong in the same picture. The boring years were when a steady buyer picked up the most shares.

For a stock like this, the question is not just, “Is it going up?”

It is also:

“Could I keep investing steadily, and keep holding, if it went through another stretch like 2023?”

Past pace rarely continues. A 45%-a-year average over five years is unusual, and it is a poor default to project forward. This is education, not investment advice. Do your own research and consider your own situation before investing in any individual stock.

Want a simple next step for the $500 habit?

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Thanks for reading. This format is built to be fast to open, clear to understand, and useful enough to act on — without pretending past returns continue forever.

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