3 must-buy travel stocks right now

After a major market sell-off, some travel stocks are now trading below pandemic levels. But one analyst sees opportunity in the chaos — Steve Trent, airline analyst at Citi, joined TheStreet to discuss his top picks.

Related: Tariffs could drive up the cost of your summer travel

Full Video Transcript Below:

STEVE TRENT: Yeah regarding the market sell off and whether or not this has created buying opportunities, I think that it could be a buying opportunity. Once we get to some kind of resolution, some kind of final breaking point on what's going to happen with tariffs. So I don't exactly know today what that breaking point is going to be, whether it's congressional pressure or business pressure, some kind of legal action from domestic or foreign entities, I'm not sure. But once we get to that breaking point and consumers and companies have better visibility in terms of investing and discretionary spending. Then I would flag that several of the network carriers look oversold. Delta  (DAL) , United  (UAL) , American's  (AAL)  equity market cap today below where it traded at the height of the pandemic. Definitely fundamentally speaking, some of these names look mispriced.

So let's say we in terms of my top picks in the travel space, maybe not right now, but certainly once we get to this resolution that I mentioned or hopefully a resolution on the tariff side, on the airline side, we have US airlines that we've called out United as a favorite US name. We've called out Panama's Copa Airlines  (CPA)  as our overall favorite for airlines in the Americas and EBIT margin in the low 20s, a 7% cash dividend yields and net leverage of around 0.5 times, that's really hard to beat, certainly when we look at the aircraft lenders, as I mentioned earlier, Ettercap happens to be our favorite one in terms of its global depth and breadth. And I would say the company has done a very good job in terms of its capital allocation strategy.