Shares of cybersecurity company CrowdStrike Holdings (NASDAQ: CRWD) surged by 33.4% in May, according to data provided by S&P Global Market Intelligence. That crushed the 0.25% return of the S 500, but I don't think investors should get excited about this stock performance in isolation.

Normally when explaining why a stock is up or down in a given month, one can point to some concrete explanations. Sometimes, those are good explanations based on the fundamentals of the business. Other times, they may be based more on the fickle feelings of the market. In the case of CrowdStrike in May, I can't point to a business reason to explain why it was up so much. Indeed, there was no meaningful company-specific news during the month.

However, compare the performance of CrowdStrike stock to key competitor SentinelOne (NYSE: S), and you'll see that the two stocks had nearly identical returns during May. This suggests that investors were simply feeling better about cloud-based cybersecurity companies during the month. And feelings can influence stock prices over short time periods.

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Source Fool.com