Shares of United Airlines Holdings (UAL) have surged over 25% in the last month taking their YTD gain to an incredible 140%. Last week, the stock even briefly traded above $100 to new all-time highs. As shown in the chart below, all of this year’s gain occurred in the last four months as the stock was down on a year-to-date basis as recently as August 5th. While a chart like this may not be too surprising if you were talking about a high-flying tech or biotech stock, for an airline that’s been around for over half a century, it seems almost unbelievable.
The recent surge in UAL is almost an exact mirror image of what happened in early 2020 during the Covid outbreak. In less than four months back then, the stock plunged from the mid-90s down to $17.80 per share as air traffic in the US ground to a halt and people feared Zoom meetings would replace business travel for good.
Putting it all together, a six-year chart of UAL is one of the stranger stock charts you’ll ever see. While the stock is trading at essentially the same levels it traded at five years ago, for more than two-thirds of the period in between, it has been in a drawdown of at least 50% from its pre-Covid all-time high.
While UAL has more than doubled this year, the same can’t be said for other US airlines. The snapshot below from our Trend Analyzer shows where each of the ten largest US traded airlines in the JETS ETF finished off November in terms of their performance and relative to their respective short-term trading ranges. While most of the stocks listed are all trading at short-term overbought levels, on a YTD basis, just four of the ten stocks shown have outperformed the S&P 500, and the only one with returns anywhere close to UAL is SkyWest (SKYW). 
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