The S&P 500's Thanksgiving Leftover Stocks in January 2026

On the day after Thanksgiving 2025, we launched a new series in which we’ll track the 10 stocks of the S&P 500 (Index: SPX) that Seeking Alpha’s Jason Capul headlined as “Thanksgiving leftovers no one wants”.

Capul identified the ten worst performing stocks of the S&P 500 in 2025, which raised a question for us. Would a Dogs of the Dow investing strategy work for the year’s worst performing component stocks of the S&P 500?

We decided we’re going to find out. We’ll track how these stocks collectively perform up through Thanksgiving 2026 using two popular methods. The first method is the simplest: we created an index with an equal number of shares of each company’s stock in it.

For the second method, we recorded the market capitalization of each company’s stock on Friday, 28 November 2025 and added the results together to find their combined market capitalization. Then we calculated the percentage of each company’s market cap with respect to that total to determine how much of a hypothetical investment would have to go into buying each stock at their closing prices recorded on 28 November 2025. The following table presents the results of that exercise:

We’ve also indicated which of these ten stocks pay dividends in the table. Here, each of three dividend payers in this collection of stocks paid quarterly dividends in December 2025 and January 2026. For the equal-weighted portfolio, which would have cost $1,143.55 for one share of each of these ten stocks at the end of trading on 28 November 2025, the effective quarterly dividend payout totaled $2.17. That’s the equivalent of an annual yield of 0.76%.

Meanwhile, the market capitalization weighting gives a slight boost to the contribution of the dividend-paying members of this group of stocks. Their annual yield is 0.86% thanks mainly to dividend payer Chipotle’s largest-in-the-group market cap.

These dividend yields are tiny. So much so they will make very little difference in the total return of our hypothetical investments in the Thanksgiving Leftover stocks during the course of the year we’ll be following them. Our plan is to track them behind the scenes while reporting the performance of the two basic portfolios without dividend reinvestment on a monthly basis. When we reach the conclusion of this series on the day after Thanksgiving 2026, we’ll report how dividend reinvestment would have affected the total returns for both portfolios.

Now that we’ve covered how we set up our two hypothetical portfolios, let’s see how they were doing through the close of trading on 27 January 2026, two months after Thanksgiving 2025:

Since Thanksgiving 2025, both the equal-weighted and market-cap weighted portfolios of these ten Thanksgiving Leftover stocks have outperformed the S&P 500. In December, the equal-weight portfolio did better than the market cap-weighted portfolio, but that reversed in January 2026 with the market cap-weighted version performing better. Through 27 January 2026, we find the market cap-weighted index of 2025′s Thanksgiving Leftover stocks is worth 106.7% of their starting value, while the equal-weight portfolio of the same stocks has grown to be 104.5% of its initial level. The S&P 500 has likewise increased, but to just 101.9% of its value on 28 November 2025.

At two months into this series, it’s far too early to say the “Thanksgiving Leftover” investing strategy will beat the S&P 500 by the time Thanksgiving 2026 rolls around. The early indication however is that the Thanksgiving Leftover investing strategy is capable of beating the index by a significant margin.

We’ll see if that’s still true near the end of February when we have a full quarter of stock price changes to consider!

Image Credit: Microsoft Copilot Designer. Prompt: “A logo to feature ‘Thanksgiving Leftover Stocks’”.