JH Kaufman

JH Kaufman

JH Kaufman was founded in 2017 by Joseph Kaufman in Chicago, Illinois. The firm operates as an independent registered investment adviser, a structure that legally obligates it to a fiduciary standard when working with clients. Its client base includes high-net-worth individuals, trusts, and corporate accounts. The firm provides financial planning alongside investment management, a dual-service model common among RIAs competing for wealth-management relationships in the Chicago market. The firm's investment approach centers on constructing concentrated, security-level portfolios utilizing both individual equities and exchange-traded funds. It functions as a discretionary manager, meaning the firm makes buy-and-sell decisions on behalf of clients without requiring pre-approval for each trade. The firm's ADV filings indicate a long-only posture in public equities. There is no public record of the firm deploying capital into venture, private equity, real estate, or alternative assets. Operational scale is modest. The firm operates from a single office in Chicago and does not publicly disclose total assets under management or a headcount. No adjacent vehicles, philanthropic foundations, or club-deal structures have been publicly linked to the firm. In its most recent regulatory filings, the firm continued to report its business as exclusively providing portfolio management and financial planning for individual and institutional clients. JH Kaufman's structural signature is its independence and fiduciary obligation. Unlike the wirehouse or bank-affiliated channels dominant in Chicago, the firm's RIA-only structure means it does not sell proprietary products or earn commissions on transactions, removing one set of embedded incentives from the advisory relationship. This architecture aligns the firm with the broader industry movement toward fee-only fiduciary advice, though its narrow geographic footprint and limited public profile distinguish it from larger, platform-scale RIAs.