With doubts about the artificial-intelligence trade mounting, investors are saying "show me the money"-favoring stocks like financials with generous dividends and buybacks.

While AI has been the market's main story line for some time, in recent weeks traders have begun to worry that the eye-popping profit growth will eventually decelerate.

That has led to a change in the type of stocks favored by the market, notes 22V Research President Dennis Debusschere in a note Wednesday.

"Over the last two months investors have shifted to paying up for certainty of cash returns while paring back their willingness to pay for future expected cash returns related to AI investments," he wrote.

Among 16 different stock factors 22V tracks, cash return, defined as dividends and buybacks as a share of net income, has performed the best this year, gaining 14.2% year to date.

Momentum and price, a factor associated with AI, has still performed well, returning nearly 10%-but it's taken it a dive in the past few weeks with decline of nearly 7%.

In addition to worries about profit growth, investors appear to be focused on rising bond yields. Yield on the 10-year Treasury note now stands at 4.64%, up 0.49 percentage points form the start of the year.

Rising Treasury yields hurt technology stocks because they make future earnings-a big part of tech's value proposition-look less attractive compared with other investments generating profits today.

One sector that has been benefiting from the shift is financials, Debusschere added.

"Financials, a sector where 65% of names have cash return yields above 10yr yields, have been the largest contributor to Cash Return gains," he wrote.

While the 22V's note doesn't recommend individual stocks, financial's strength should come as no surprise.

The Invesco KBW Bank ETF has returned 12% in the past three months, thanks to a blowout second-quarter earnings season. Large banks benefited from strong trading and merger activity, while smaller banks, which rely more on taking deposits and issuing loans, were helped by a steepening yield curve.

A group of the nation's largest banks, including JPMorgan, Wells Fargo and Morgan Stanley, announced dividend hikes in June, after the Fed said they cleared its annual stress test. A number of banks also increased share repurchases.

While a bank ETF is one way to play the "cash return" trade, it isn't the only one.

The Cambria Shareholder Yield ETF also targets companies that boast generous cash payouts to investors. The fund has about 22% of its portfolio invested in financial stocks, and it too has rallied in the past three months, returning 10%.

Among the financial stocks in the ETF's portfolio are Citizens Financial, M&T Bank and Truist Financial.

Citizens, which pays a 2.6% dividend yield, recently said it repurchased $225 million of shares during the second quarter. M&T Bank, which yields 2.5%, repurchased $465 million worth. Truist, which yields 4%, repurchased $1.2 billion.

One point worth noting, Cambria defines shareholder yield as dividends plus net stock buybacks and net debt reduction, divided by market cap-a similar, but not identical approach to 22V's "cash returns."