Todd Young Says He Has Never Traded a Stock. Eighteen Filings Never Show One.

Two federal disclosure systems, fifteen years, and the only line that isn't a bank account is a defined-benefit pension his wife sold last year and a 529 education plan that bought and sold itself back within six months in 2014-15. The senator campaigning to ban stock trading by Congress represents the same state, and backs the same bill, as a House colleague whose trust held and traded individual stocks — the practice the bill targets — until he ordered it to stop, last year.

Todd Young has been telling reporters, television interviewers, and the readers of his own newspaper column that he has never personally bought or sold a share of stock in fifteen years of federal office. That is, structurally, an unusual kind of claim: Congress built the machinery to check it before Young ever said it out loud. Two separate offices — the Senate's and the House's — require the same filing every year he has held either seat, under penalty of law, and the filing asks a yes-or-no question. I pulled every one on record: eleven annual reports from the Senate's disclosure office, seven documents from the House Clerk's, running from Young's first full year in the House in 2011 to the report he filed this past June. I read all eighteen.

None of it required guessing at his state of mind. Both disclosure systems, worded slightly differently but asking the identical thing, put a yes-or-no question to Young every year under the Ethics in Government Act: whether he, his spouse, or a dependent child bought, sold, or exchanged a reportable asset worth more than $1,000. Underneath that sits a second, faster test — the Periodic Transaction Report the STOCK Act added in 2012, due within 45 days of an actual trade, the instrument built specifically to catch a member of Congress buying or selling stock while sitting on information the public doesn't have yet. Young has filed eleven Senate annuals and seven House documents. He has filed zero of the other kind. Neither disclosure system has any record of him ever being late to disclose a stock trade, for the reason that neither has a record of him disclosing one at all.

What the eighteen filings show instead is close to the least eventful portfolio a two-term senator can have. From 2016 through 2024, the reportable assets repeat nearly verbatim, year on year: a joint checking-and-savings account at Old National Bank in Bloomington, generally $1,001 to $15,000 and, in the one year it grew past that, $15,001 to $50,000; a savings account at Midsouthern Savings Bank, same town, mostly in the same bracket or lower; and his wife's account in the Indiana Prosecuting Attorney's Retirement Fund, a state defined-benefit pension built from her years in county prosecutors' offices, worth $50,001 to $100,000 and generating, in the form's own printed language, year after year without variation, "None (or less than $201)." A household running a stock portfolio would have needed different words at some point in a decade. This one never did.

The one line that breaks the pattern sits in the most recent filing, for calendar year 2025: his wife sold that pension fund outright, for between $50,001 and $100,000, on May 1. It is the only entry Young has ever filed in Part 4b — the slower schedule, for transactions the faster one, the actual Periodic Transaction Report, didn't already catch. Part 4a, across eleven Senate years, has never had anything to catch. And what sold in 2025 was not a security in any market sense: a state government's own defined-benefit account, the kind that pays out on a formula set by statute, with no ticker and nothing to leak. Nothing about the sale required Young or his household to know anything the public didn't.

Go back to the House years, which the Senate's database doesn't reach, and the record adds exactly one more asset class, briefly, then drops it: 529 college-savings plans, invested in Age-Based Option growth portfolios — funds that shift automatically from stocks toward cash as a beneficiary nears enrollment. The 2014 annual report shows four purchases into those portfolios, made the same August day, each between $1,001 and $15,000. The 2015 annual shows four sales, made the same February day, of what reads as the same four positions, for close to the same amounts — a household moving money between two pre-set education funds six months apart, not a member of Congress picking a stock and riding it. Every other House-era annual, from Young's first full year in 2011 through his last in 2015, answers the transaction question the way the Senate filings later would: no. A one-page extension request on file from May 2013, buying Young thirty extra days to submit his 2012 annual, contains no financial information at all; the report itself followed a month later and matched every year around it.

This is the record standing behind a senator who has spent 2026 asking Congress to ban a practice his own paperwork never once shows him engaging in. Young is cosponsoring the Restore Trust in Congress Act and the Stop Insider Trading Act, wrote an op-ed in the Indianapolis Star making the case in moral terms, and told the Indiana Capital Chronicle in August that "certain members of Congress, not most, but some, are trading on non-public, market-moving information, and that's not only unethical. It is destructive to trust in our republican system of government." Nothing I found disputes a fact above. What the coverage differs on — without any two outlets ever landing on opposite facts — is what to make of the timing, and which neighbor in Young's own state delegation the push gets measured against.

Rep. Shreve's own account, relayed to the Capital Chronicle, is that the trades on his disclosures ran through a charitable trust he and his wife had set up, overseen by an investment manager, and that he directed the manager to sell off individual stock and move the money into mutual funds only last year — after he'd already shown up on the lists. Young said he regarded Shreve as a "highly ethical and public-spirited person" and that the push wasn't sparked by any one colleague. Both things can be true. What the two men's paper trails establish, without either senator or reporter having to adjudicate the other's ethics, is that one delegation member needed an instruction to his own money manager to arrive where the other one started.

None of these readings retires the others. A position can be sincerely held, strategically timed for a possible 2028 primary, and unremarkable small talk on a Sunday politics show, all at once — the record in front of the desk doesn't settle which mix it is, and adjudicating a senator's motive against his own clean paperwork is not a job the paperwork can do. What the record does settle is narrower and holds under all three readings at once: whichever motive a reader assigns, nothing in fifteen years of disclosure required Young to sell anything to be allowed to make this argument. The Capital Chronicle reports that the group paying to broadcast his stance, the Endless Frontier Innovation Fund, "isn't required to disclose its funding sources and it did not answer questions from the Capital Chronicle about who has given it money" — an ad campaign whose own finances are harder to check than the senator's it is promoting.

The STOCK Act's penalty for a late trade disclosure is a flat $200, which Young's own column calls "virtually toothless" without mentioning that his own filings have never once put the tooth to a test. Eighteen forms, fifteen years, two federal disclosure regimes, and the most eventful thing in the file is a pension account changing hands between spouses, denominated in a currency no committee assignment could have moved. If a record I was asked to check came back this clean, I would file it as a null result and move to the next name.

claim: Todd Young's financial disclosures show no reportable stock transaction and no Periodic Transaction Report across fifteen years in both chambers · status: established — eleven Senate annual reports and seven House-era filings are on record, and the only two transactions disclosed anywhere in that span are a 529 education-savings reallocation in 2014-15 and a spouse's 2025 sale of her own state government pension, neither an equity security; the law's own $1,000 reporting floor means a smaller, undisclosed purchase or sale would not surface in this record either way, and this file does not close that door · claim: why Young is pushing the ban now · status: unresolved — sincere conviction, primary-season positioning, and routine constituent-services messaging are all consistent with the same record and none is established or ruled out by it · confidence: high on the disclosed record, checked directly against both chambers' primary filings; on the second claim, confidence: 0.0. probability mass ≠ 1.0.

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