A mutual fund held for a decade with no trades and no logins looks, to a state database, a lot like an abandoned account. The Investment Company Institute says that reading is wrong, arguing in a Viewpoints blog published July 14, 2026, that millions of Americans hold mutual funds, ETFs, stocks, and other securities for years by design. Inactivity is strategy, not surrender.
Why inactivity is not abandonment
The case for the long-term investor is direct. Buying and holding is a deliberate choice. An investor who rarely logs in or never places a trade is not missing in action.
The ICI made the point explicitly: Americans buy these securities with the intention of holding them for years. They may not log in often. They may not trade. That profile describes a long-term investor, the organization argued, not someone who has walked away from an account. Treating those investors as having abandoned their holdings is a misread of intent.
The organization's choice to frame this as a state-level concern is telling. The ICI's headline names states specifically. The argument is not directed at federal regulators. It is aimed at state governments.
The counterargument
The counterargument deserves its due. Dormant accounts are real. Assets do go genuinely orphaned when account holders die without notifying beneficiaries, lose track of old positions, or simply forget. State unclaimed property programs were built around that reality. A state that cannot distinguish between a patient investor and a forgotten account still has to draw a line somewhere, and any threshold broad enough to catch the truly abandoned will sweep in some accounts that were never lost.
That is where the policy tension sits.
On balance
On balance, the ICI's argument is that the line is currently drawn in the wrong place. Long-term investors who hold mutual funds, ETFs, and other securities for years without transacting are not absent. They are still owners. The line to watch is how states define dormancy, and whether that definition has room for the investor who bought in and simply plans to hold.