The Worst Of 2025's Thanksgiving Leftover Stocks

The Trade Desk has continued to fall sharply relative to the S&P 500 in the months since the Thanksgiving 2025 “leftover” experiment began. It is now on track to become one of the S&P 500’s worst-performing stocks of 2026, while some other stocks in the same cohort have already outperformed the index. The setup signals persistent weak momentum/market skepticism toward Trade Desk versus broader equities.

Analysis

TTD’s slide matters less as a single-name story and more as a signal that the market is de-rating the open-internet ad stack. When a high-multiple platform loses momentum, buyers typically don’t wait for fundamentals to catch up; they rotate budgets toward channels with clearer attribution and higher near-term ROAS, which usually means the large closed ecosystems first. That creates a second-order tailwind for GOOGL, META, and AMZN, while keeping pressure on public ad-tech names that depend on programmatic spend and “clean room” optimism.

The immediate risk is technical: once a former momentum leader enters the “cannot own” bucket, systematic selling can extend the drawdown for weeks even without fresh bad news. Over 1-3 months, the key catalyst is whether agency checks and quarterly digital-ad commentary confirm that CTV and open-web share gains are still accruing to independent DSPs versus being internalized by walled gardens. If budget growth is intact but TTD still lags, that would imply a market-share problem rather than a macro problem, which is much harder to reverse.

The contrarian view is that this may be over-discounting a quality business into a valuation trough before fundamentals visibly break. If management can show stable take rate, retained spend, and no customer concentration loss on the next print, the stock could rebound sharply because sentiment is already stretched. What would falsify a bearish view is a rapid reacceleration in customer spend or a clear inflection in net retention/CCF in the next two quarters; absent that, the path of least resistance remains lower.

Key Decisions for Investors

• Avoid bottom-fishing TTD immediately; let the stock base for 2-4 weeks and require evidence of stabilization versus the ad-tech peer basket before getting involved.
• Relative-value short: TTD vs long GOOGL or META for the next 1-3 months; if budget shifts are the real mechanism, the closed ecosystems should absorb incremental spend faster than the independent DSP recovers.
• Watchlist long only if TTD trades to a materially cheaper multiple after the next earnings cycle and management can defend share loss with hard retention data; otherwise keep it as a no-trade name.
• For ad-tech exposure, prefer the highest-quality cash-generative beneficiaries of CTV monetization over pure DSP beta; if TTD weakness persists, the market is signaling that execution dispersion is widening.
• Set an alert for the next earnings call and agency channel checks: a positive inflection in spend growth or net new logos would be the earliest falsifier of the bearish momentum thesis.