Chart Of The Day: FedEx Shares Could Deliver Solid Holiday Gains

 | Nov 30, 2020 09:44AM ET

In-store sales on Black Friday were gutted by COVID-19, cut by more than half according to retail traffic and analytics firm Sensormatic Solutions, dropping by 52.1% from last year. On the other hand, online sales broke records as many customers chose to do their holiday shopping from the safety of their homes.

Still, though foot traffic to bricks-and-mortar outlets was a bust, Black Friday 2020 still managed to score some retail records: online sales hit $9 billion on the Friday that follows Thanksgiving in the US, for growth of 22% from last year according to Adobe Analytics, which analyzes website transactions from 80 of the top 100 US online retailers.

That beat all expectations, and made Friday, Nov. 27, 2020 the second richest online spending day in US history, right behind 2019’s Cyber Monday. Analysts expect this Cyber Monday, which takes place today, to achieve a new record as well, with estimates for the total figure spent to come in somewhere in the $10.8 billion to $12.7 billion range, reflecting as much as a 35% increase from last year.

Along with such obvious coronavirus shopping beneficiaries as Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN) and eBay (NASDAQ:EBAY), there's another, less obvious business segment that's likely to see a windfall. That would be companies delivering the packages consumers shelled out for. In that category, the two biggest firms are United Parcel Service (NYSE:UPS) and FedEx Corporation (NYSE:FDX).

From a technical perspective, we prefer FedEx since it looks as if UPS might be topping out.