I deleted a previous evaluation, but am rewriting and posting it on account of American Trust's…read morereaction to our family winning 100% of what we requested in reaction to stockbroker Steven Foreman Kahn of this company having sold my now deceased 97+ year-old aunt GWG Holdings L Bonds. By September of 2020, when Kahn sold $20,000 of them to my aunt, 95% of American stockbrokers had declined to sell them, as their financials were awful and their fraudulent nature was obvious -- or should have been to anybody studying them or recommending them to clients. However, Kahn apparently could not resist the high commission, he knew my aunt trusted him completely, and apparently he felt entitled to squander her money, perhaps because her accounts at American Trust were doing better than his own. In any event, Kahn's actions were unconscionable and he deceived my aunt , not just in the case of the L Bonds, but on many other occasions, as well. Steven Foreman Kahn of American Trust was my aunt's financial advisor for over 20 years. After she died in 2020 at the age of 97, having been legally blind the entire time they worked together, my daughter and I learned that we had inherited half the contents of her investment account held by this company. We ALSO discovered that Kahn had sold her $20,000 worth of GWG Holdings L Bonds, a blatantly fraudulent Ponzi scheme that we assume provided him a generous commission. We went through FINRA arbitration, a process that took nearly a year from start to finish, and just won back all $10,000 of our half of the investment that we would have been able to collect had Kahn not unscrupulously or incompetently invested it in these junk bonds for my aunt, plus $4,000 in interest and the $425 we paid FINRA for the privilege of filing for arbitration. It was a small but sweet victory, and evidence of it will forever appear on Steven Foreman Kahn's BrokerCheck page, along with a 2010 disclosure of his having bought and sold stock on behalf of a dead person. He was sanctioned $10,000 in that case, suspended from work for a month and fired. Oops. When my aunt died, we also came to realize that Kahn had invested her in Real Estate Investment Trusts (REITs), which the SEC considers unethical to sell to anyone over the age of 75. They are illiquid, so older folks may not live to see any benefit from them. However, they offer brokers higher commissions than do regular stock sales, so we gather that Kahn could not resist them. We lost money on the REITs. He all bought my uber-elderly aunt into several other obscure, high-risk investments, a number of which turned out to have no value at all by the time we inherited them. He bought her into Class A investments, as well, which, again, are characterized by high commissions and illiquidity and are not considered appropriate for sale to the public. A forensic economist estimated that if Kahn and American Trust had handled my aunt's trading account in a competent and honest manner, it would have yielded another whopping $1 million for our nuclear and extended family. Even if he was wrong (but I don't think so -- the guy has a PhD and has analyzed stock portfolios and served as an expert witness in securities fraud cases for a living for decades) and American Trust squandered half of what he estimated, that would still have allowed my family to inherit significantly more than we did. During the last week, I have been corresponding with Kahn's boss, managing partner Michael Grady, who has refused to acknowledge that American Trust was doing anything other than legitimately diversifying my aunt's accounts by selling her so many REITs, Class A investments and other "alternative" investments. He suggested that American Trust had done so in order to protect my aunt from the volatility of the stock market. He also has refused to acknowledge the fraudulent nature of GWG Holdings L Bonds, instead referring to them as part of a moderate approach to investing for a 90+ year-old client, while all they served to do was relieve my aunt of some of her wealth while lining the pockets of Steven Foreman Kahn and American Trust. He engaged in a lot of mansplaining, too, send me charts showing how volatile the stock market has been in the past 20+ years to justify the co.'s theft. I have a disabled daughter. Kahn knew that, as my aunt confided in him and considered him a close friend. My daughter would have inherited significantly more money for her upkeep after my husband and I die someday if Kahn had been able to stop himself from investing my aunt in so many "alternative" (and losing) ventures, while my trusting aunt could not see what he was doing, literally and figuratively. The entire situation was absolutely disgraceful and appears to have accelerated as my aunt aged. MY ADVICE TO YOU IS TO AVOID KAHN AND THIS COMPANY LIKE THE PLAGUE. Shame on you, American Trust Investment Services of Whiting, IN, and Steven Foreman Kahn.

OMG! It doesn't get any worse than this folks. Okay ya think you know a person. You think you can…read moretrust them and that they would have your back when it comes to trust and placing you in suitable investments as your profile demonstrates. As a retiree you know not to place clients in highly speculative or excessively risky investment vehicles but that's exactly what Mr Schultz did. After transferring out of ATIS we both discovered the sneaky things that were done to our accounts risking our portfolios! Allowing one's personal love life to cloud his judgment by refusing to meet with his long time clients. I find this both shocking, rude and unprofessional! Run folks!!!! You have been warned!!!!