GE is coming off its best week in nearly a decade.
The one-time Dow stock ended Friday with a weekly gain of more than 17 percent, its best since March 2009, after a CEO shakeup last week.
One technical analyst says this rebound could prove nothing more than temporary.
"Let's call it a fundamental reshuffling and you're getting a technical dead cat bounce from this," Bill Baruch, president of Blue Line Futures, told CNBC's "Trading Nation" on Friday.
A "dead cat bounce" is when a stock sees a short-lived rally following a sharp and sustained decline. At its lows in late September, GE was 55 percent off its 52-week high set last October. Even after last week's gains, it remains 46 percent from that high.
This recovery could turn into a bigger breakout if it can break through one key technical level, according to Baruch.
"What I would say is more than just a dead cat bounce would be a move above its 200-day moving average at $14.14," said Baruch. "If that does [happen], you could see a rise back to about unchanged on the year."
GE would need to rally 7 percent to break through its 200-day moving average at $14.06. A move back to unchanged for the year at $17.45 represents a 32 percent rally from Friday's level. The stock was up nearly 2 percent at $13.44 in Monday's premarket after an upgrade by Barclays.
The embattled industrial giant cut loose CEO John Flannery last Monday, replacing him with former Danaher chief Larry Culp. The change in C-suite leadership swept its shares back up to early August highs.
One market watcher says the fundamentals haven't changed enough to support a full recovery.
"The problem is a lot of the problems that investors had with the prior CEO were problems that he inherited and didn't necessarily create," Erin Gibbs, portfolio manager at S&P Global Market Intelligence, said of Flannery.
Culp faces similar issues that plagued Flannery's tenure, Gibbs continued.
He has "some major headwinds facing him, particularly with the asset write-downs and the problems with the power business," she said. "We just don't see that turnaround, and I don't see that a new CEO is going to be that key to turning the ship around just yet."
Flannery held the CEO position for just over a year. From the announcement of his appointment in mid-June 2017 to his dismissal this year, the stock tumbled nearly 60 percent.
