By Medha Singh

(Reuters) – U.S. stock futures rose on Monday thanks to megacap firms, but investors were still nervous about hundreds of Omicron flight cancellations at the beginning of the year’s last trading week.

Stocks in travel, which are sensitive to news about the coronavirus, fell after U.S. airlines cancelled many flights on Sunday due to rising COVID-19 rates. This forced holiday weekend travelers to make changes to their plans.

Delta Air Lines (NYSE 🙂 United Airlines and American Airlines (NASDAQ :), and Southwest Airlines (NYSE 🙂 both dropped between 1.5% to 2.8% premarket. Cruise operators Norwegian Cruise Line (NYSE:) Holdings, Royal Caribbean (NYSE 🙂 Carnival (NYSE 🙂 Corp dropped 2%-2.8%

On Thursday, the closing price hit a new record as investors reacted to positive news about the Omicron coronavirus variant. Investors were worried about the strain’s potential economic effects after it upset markets earlier in the month.

Wall Street’s three main indexes are eyeing a third straight yearly gain, with the benchmark S&P 500 on track to close out the year 25.8% higher. While the Dow will increase 17.5%, the Nasdaq can expect a 21.4% rise.

6.12 AM ET was up 25 points or 0.07%. ET was up 9 or 0.19%.

These were up 42.5 percentage points (or 0.26%) as megacaps Tesla (NASDAQ) Inc Microsoft Corp (NASDAQ:) Meta Platform was firmed between 0.5% & 1%

In the future, markets could be more volatile if there are fewer trading volumes than usual in New Year.