Tax-loss selling candidates 2026

The 25 biggest S&P 500 losers of 2026, as of October 30, 2026 · Data: Yahoo Finance

Late in the year, investors holding losing positions face a tax decision: sell before December 31 and the loss can be used to offset capital gains elsewhere. The table below lists the 25 S&P 500 stocks with the largest year-to-date losses, as of October 30, 2026. The hardest hit is AppLovin (APP), down -66.09% year to date.

Read it as data, not as a shopping list. A stock that has fallen the farthest is not, by that fact alone, a bargain, and whether harvesting a loss makes sense depends on an individual tax situation this page cannot see. What follows the table is a plain-words explanation of the concept, the rules that govern it, and the risks.

What tax-loss harvesting is

Tax-loss harvesting means deliberately selling an investment that is worth less than you paid for it, in a taxable account, so the loss becomes a realized capital loss on your tax return. Realized losses first offset capital gains you realized during the year. If losses exceed gains, up to $3,000 of the excess can offset ordinary income each year, and the rest carries forward to future years.

Many investors who harvest a loss immediately buy a different, similar investment, so their money stays invested in roughly the same kind of asset while the tax loss is banked. That substitution step is where the wash-sale rule (below) matters most.

Why the biggest losers see extra selling into year-end

Two seasonal forces land on the same stocks each fall. Individual investors sell losers in November and December to realize losses before the tax year closes. Investment funds do something similar ahead of their reporting dates, when managers tidy portfolios so published holdings do not show the year's worst names, a practice often called window dressing. Both flows add sell orders to stocks that are already down the most, which is why the names in the table above can keep sliding into December even on days when nothing about the underlying businesses changes.

The January effect

Researchers have long documented a tendency for beaten-down stocks, especially smaller ones, to rebound in January once the year-end tax selling stops. The pattern is known as the January effect, and tax-loss selling rebounding is one of its standard explanations: the extra supply disappears, and some sellers buy back in after the wash-sale window passes.

Treat it as a historical tendency, not a schedule. The effect is strongest in small-cap stocks, weaker in a large-cap index like the S&P 500, uneven from year to year, and it does not rescue companies whose businesses are genuinely deteriorating. Some Januarys the losers simply keep losing.

The wash-sale rule, in plain words

If you sell a security at a loss and buy a substantially identical security within 30 days before or after the sale, the IRS wash-sale rule disallows the loss for the current tax year. The window is 61 days wide: the sale day plus 30 days on either side. A disallowed loss is usually not gone forever; it is added to the cost basis of the replacement shares, which defers the benefit rather than deleting it.

The classic trap is the simplest trade: sell a stock for the loss, then buy the same stock back a week later because it looks cheap. That repurchase makes the loss unusable for the year. The rule can also reach across your accounts; buying the same security in a retirement account inside the window can disallow the loss permanently. What counts as substantially identical is not defined with precision: the same company's stock clearly qualifies, while a different company's stock in the same industry generally does not. This section is general education about a widely published rule, not tax advice for any specific situation.

The risks

A loser can keep losing. The stocks in this table fell for reasons that may be temporary, but may also be structural: a shrinking market, a broken balance sheet, heavy dilution or a product that stopped mattering. A price that is 60 percent lower than it was in January is 60 percent lower, not 60 percent cheap; value depends on what the business will earn, not on how far the price has travelled. There are tax risks too: losses inside retirement accounts cannot be harvested at all, the value of a harvested loss depends on your gains and tax bracket, and a careless repurchase can void the whole exercise. Anyone weighing a year-end trade should run the numbers for their own situation, ideally with a tax professional.

The full picture is on the year-to-date leaderboard, which ranks all 500 stocks from the year's biggest winner to the names listed here.

Year-to-date returns measured from the December 31, 2025 close to the latest close (October 30, 2026), prices adjusted for splits and dividends. Source: Yahoo Finance. This page is general education about a tax concept, not tax or financial advice.

For informational purposes only, not financial advice.

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