Today we’d like to introduce you to Richard and Karl Kaufman.
Richard and Karl, please share your story with us.
Karl: I’ve always been inspired by my father. He was born into a struggling family in a tough Brooklyn neighborhood, and his father died when my dad was only 7 years old. He was determined to be the first member of his family to go to college, and after graduating, went on to a successful career as a scientist and engineer.
He was able to retire at a young age, and then increased his standard of living during retirement, due to his investing in the stock market. Most retirees worry about whether they’ll outlive their life savings, but my dad tripled his net worth over the last 12 years.
He’s truly the American Dream personified, and he made this dream come true through hard work and teaching himself how to invest. That’s how I came up with the name for our business: American Dream Investing.
Richard: American Dream Investing was an idea that my son, Karl, came up with. I would often get calls and emails from friends and family asking me what I was investing in.
Karl and I teamed up to create a membership service where I share all of my stock trades with members through text messages and emails. It’s a unique service that didn’t exist before — we don’t manage money; we give people information so that they can manage their investments for themselves.
Karl now writes about money and investing for Forbes and we’ve continued to grow our membership. We look forward to many happy returns in the future!
Overall, has it been relatively smooth? If not, what were some of the struggles along the way?
Karl: One of our biggest challenges has been creating a new technology that would send text messages and emails as fast as possible to members all over the world. The stock market changes by the second, and we needed to ensure rapid delivery so that our members could copy, as closely as possible, our trades in real-time.
We had to experiment with countless apps and spent many, many hours developing a system before we were comfortable accepting members. Now, whenever we make a trade, we’re confident in how fast our text messages are delivered to members so that, if they’d like, they can make a trade within seconds of ours.
Please tell us about American Dream Investing.
Richard: We send out our stock market trades to members in real-time, which is a new approach to investing. Other services offer newsletters or only send emails. But so many emails are lost in the clutter of their inbox.
Our trade signals are actionable ideas, and the sooner someone receives them, the quicker they can act. Text messages are a faster and more efficient way of getting our trades out, and, with everyone carrying their phone around with them, members can make a trade like ours wherever they are. To my knowledge, there’s no other service like ours that can offer that.
Karl: What really sets us apart is our long-term track record. My dad has more than doubled the S&P 500 over the past ten years, all without paying any fees to hedge funds or financial advisors. Our service offers people the chance to invest like a millionaire without paying any money management fees.
If you had to go back in time and start over, would you have done anything differently?
Karl: When you start a business, it’s easy to spend too much time carefully planning everything. I’ve learned that defined action is more important than putting things off until you have a perfect plan in place.
Reid Hoffman, the founder of LinkedIn, said: “Starting a business is like jumping off a cliff and building a plane on the way down.” All the planning in the world can’t prepare you for what’s next — you need to leap before you look and be able to adapt on the fly!
Contact Info:
- Website: www.americandreaminvesting.com
- Email: info@americandreaminvesting.com
- Facebook: facebook.com/americandreaminvesting
- Twitter: twitter.com/adreaminvesting
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