➡ Carlos Cortez, a financial advisor, hosts a podcast called “Scriptures in Wall Street” where he discusses financial matters. In a recent episode, he warned about the future of Social Security, stating that it might not be as reliable in the future due to rising costs and decreasing birth rates. He also discussed the volatility of the stock market and the potential for increased taxes on retirement accounts. Carlos encourages listeners to be proactive about their retirement plans and to stay informed about changes in the financial landscape.
➡ The stock market, including the New York Stock Exchange and NASDAQ, is showing signs of decline, which could impact your retirement funds if they’re invested in stocks, ETFs, or mutual funds. However, there are ways to protect your money, such as using money managers and traders who monitor your investments daily. It’s also possible to balance risk and returns based on your personal needs and circumstances. Lastly, investing in certain accounts can guarantee your principal amount, providing a safer option amidst market volatility.
➡ The speaker encourages listeners to embrace faith, stating that reading religious texts can reduce anxiety and temptation. They urge people to accept the Holy Spirit, which they believe can help them positively impact others. The speaker also shares personal updates, mentioning they’ve been ill but are feeling better, and comments on the unusually cold weather in Tampa. They conclude by wishing their listeners well and promising to speak again soon.

So much has already happened in the first half, and the acceptance speeches have been on fire. Who got shouted out the most? Let’s look at the numbers. Alright, cast and crew are leading the way with 11 mentions. Moms are holding strong with 3 shoutouts. God, creator of the universe, 0 mentions. And Mario Lopez, host of Access Hollywood, won. I ask you, we’ve got to deal with this misinformation. There are hurricane force winds of mis and disinformation lies. People want to divide this country, and we’re going to have to address that as well. And it breaks my heart, as people are suffering and struggling, that we’re up against those hurricane forces as well.

I think I would have beaten Trump, could have beaten Trump, and I think that Kamala could have beaten Trump, and would have beaten Trump. Hello, guys, this is Carlos Cortez here with another episode of Scriptures in Wall Street. I hope you’re doing well, and thanks for tuning in. Don’t forget to like and subscribe to our new channel on Rumble, Scriptures in Wall Street. I do have some private content. I like to go live sometimes and just talk about things that I see in town. Surveillance is just weird things, buildings that are just vacant, just random things.

So all you got to do is go to rumble.com, go to Scriptures in Wall Street, like and subscribe over there if you don’t mind. It’ll help monetize our platform. And yeah, this stuff’s expensive, it’s not cheap. But when it comes to your retirement, there are a lot of things that we can talk about. But before I do, let me say my disclosure, I am a financial advisor. Everything on this podcast is meant for information and education purposes only. I am not giving investment advice. If you would like investment advice now, you can give us a call 813-448-3446.

Again, it’s 813-448-3446. You can visit us at CortezWM.com. If you would like a free retirement guide, you can go to AmericaFirstRetirementPlan.com. You can also request a copy of our book that we’ve written about the WOKE agenda, about the America First agenda, and how not to fund communism through your current investments. I wrote a whole book about all this, and it’s yours to have. All you got to do is just book a phone call with us. If you’re a current client, just email us info at CortezWM.com. We’ll ship it to you, no cost, and I’ll even sign it.

Well, with that being said, guys, I wanted to just really talk about creating income. What does that mean? We get the call. Hey, Carlos, I’m about to retire. I’m 55 years old. I want to retire when I’m 60. I got half a million bucks. I want to make sure it’s there. I want to make sure that I can have the ability to stream an income. So, there’s different ways. I was dropping my son off of school this morning, and I heard an ad about promoting a bond account. And so, literally, there’s people promoting a bond account at 6%, getting 6%.

So, I do have to err this out of caution with this, because bonds, yes, they got smacked in 2022, going into 23. Interest rates go up, bond prices go down. So, now that interest rates are going down, bond prices are going up, but are they really going up? The other thing is that Wall Street’s really scared. Today and Friday, market was down tremendously, because they’re talking about possibly rising the interest rates all over again. Like, the Fed doesn’t even know what they’re doing. The Fed doesn’t even know what they’re doing. We have unreliable debt, unsecured, reliable debt that is in a trillion.

It’s like we are screwed if we don’t figure this out. So, we have to get this GDP in order. We have to get the terrorists in order. We have to get America back on track, financially speaking, because Social Security is going to run out. And the reason why it’s going to completely just get destroyed here, and it’s not me, fear mongering, I’m going to ssa.gov. This is their site here. So, the concept of solvency, sustainable budget impact, or common discussions of Social Security, but are well not understood. Currently, the Social Security board, trustees project the cost to rise by 2035, so the tax will be enough to pay.

For only 75% of scheduled benefits, this increase in cost results for populating aging, not because we are living longer, but because birth rates drop from two to three children per woman. Importantly, this shortfall is basically stable at 2035. And it goes on in a really long article, but hey, I’m going to go to the chart here. Hopefully, you guys see this chart here. Let me make sure. Yep. So, you see this first squiggly line here. This is when it’s expected to go. If they start delaying and making proportionate changes, they could make it last at 2040, 2038.

Now, what they’re going to do, guys, is they’re not going to get rid of Social Security. They are going to water it down. No sitting president wants that on their watch, saying, hey, this guy got rid of Social Security. So, what is going to happen is they’re just going to raise taxes on your qualified plans. They’re going to raise taxes on your IRAs, your 401Ks, make rollovers harder. There’s currently about $34 trillion in retirement accounts that you don’t even know how much you’re paying taxes in. Try to tell me they don’t have a plan. Try to tell me they don’t have a plan on how to fund Ukraine and fund Israel and fund all these countries when we have people here in America struggling, single moms struggling.

We have business owners that can’t even make payroll that are working hard to provide for the families, to provide for the employees’ families. But yet, you can cross the border here illegally and get fed like a fat cat. And the reason why they can do this is because when you have a retirement account, you basically do not have any control on how they’re going to tax you. When you have a 401K, when you have an IRA, you are deferring your taxes, and you got in a partnership with the IRS. And they control how much you can take out.

And if you don’t, they’ll beat you up with a 50% penalty if you don’t take it out on time. And if you take it out too early, they beat you up with a 10% penalty. So I think Social Security is going to be around. It’s just not going to look like it is now. So if you’re on Social Security right now, enjoy it. Get your money’s worth, is all I’m saying, because there’s got to be some things that they got to do in order to preserve it. There’s got to be some changes, and there will be some changes.

And I believe Trump… I haven’t heard too much what Trump’s going to do with Social Security, but he only has four years to really undo all this junk that Biden did. I mean, it’s terrible. I don’t think he can do it in four years. He’s going to have to work on steroids every single day. He’s got a lot of work he’s got to do. Speaking of which, I want to pan over to the markets real quick. I’m going to try to keep this short today. So one of the major things that we look at is the volatility index.

The volatility index measures the fear and greed of the markets. So when the markets go bad, typically when it goes south, you’ll start to see the volatility index increase. And we saw that a little bit today. The volatility index went back up to 16. It was hovering around 13 and it shot up to 16. So we’re getting green traffic lights here, guys. Basically, this means that there’s a lot of momentum going up. So this is on a weekly. Let’s show the daily. Yeah, so we’re starting to see some increase. If it gets to over 18, then it’s starting to be extremely volatile, like markets are going down.

And right now, through this technical indicators, we’re starting to see some increases, some possible huge projections on the way up. Now, if this goes up, I mean stock market going down. But I wanted to actually show you something real quick. P500, we start to see red lights, red traffic lights on the bottom, on the short-term, mid-term, and long-term. So it’s not looking good right now. We’re experiencing a cycle bottom, basically. It’s run its course. And we are losing momentum. The waves are getting weaker and weaker, as you see. This was back in Q1.

This was a really big wave. We had a golden cross here. Boom. Another potential golden cross that went up. Wave got weaker. And we had a big wave here, a smaller wave, and there’s no wave right here. And we’re starting to see, obviously, we got red traffic lights short, mid-term, and long-term. The clouds here represent momentum as well. And I’m not liking what I see. You look at the volatility index going up. I’m getting red traffic lights on the S&P 500. It might be time, guys. I’m just saying. It might be time where we see a correction.

I got a death cross on the New York Stock Exchange. That is going down. This is going down. So we have a death cross on the New York Stock Exchange. This is going down. I’m going to take a look at the Russell 2000. Red traffic lights on the Russell 2000. Boom. The small caps are going down. So we have a huge projection on the downside here. So my question to you is, how are you securing your retirement if your money is in a stock market? And do you have small caps? Do you have money in New York Stock Exchange? Because if you have stocks and equities and ETFs and mutual funds, chances are you probably are in one of these financial markets and you will be correlated.

Now, if you’re pulling 5% or 6% out of your portfolios to supplement your retirement, is that really the smartest thing to do in this day and age? Only you can answer. So that’s the Russell 2000. Let me check out the NASDAQ. Oh, man. Check this out. We’re seeing negative projections on the NASDAQ. Yeah. So volatility is up. NASDAQ is starting to go down. New York Stock Exchange is going down. IWM is going down, which is a Russell 2000. So we have four major indices that are pointing down. This is serious. It’s time. It’s time to buckle up.

Buckle up. We are having a havoc. Could possibly be a correction territory. It doesn’t matter to us. Like my clients are going to be fine. We believe in safe money. We believe in accounts, having accounts where we can just protect your principal regardless of the manipulations of the market. But we also have a bucket of money called yellow money or manage accounts where those of you that Charles Schwab fidelity, and you’re just letting it sit and ride. Hopefully, hopefully the market goes up. I challenge you to give us a call because we have money managers and traders that watch your money every single day and second.

There’s a room full of day traders that work for you that manage a portfolio, manage a risk. It’s not guaranteed. It’s stock. It is in the market, but at least you have you have institutions trading your money so that you can get returns and so that you can void the losses, right? You want to try to protect your principal as much as possible. Well, we have accounts that are insurance base that guarantee your principal and then we have accounts that are liquid that do have some risk. That have a little bit of volatility, but you can control the temperature gauge if you want more risk, if you want more returns, or if you want less risk and smaller returns.

But the major thing is liquid. And so we always have to play this balancing act of which is better for you. And it all depends on your suitability needs, your liquidity needs, your age, what kind of money is it, is it taxable account if it’s non-taxable. Those, those type of questions we would ask when we have a consultation. So if you would like to learn more about this, all you gotta do is give us a call 813-448-3446. Again, 813-448-3446, or you can visit us at CortezWM.com. Let’s see here. So the other, the other cool part is, is that we have the cues.

I do want to bring up something real quick because we get a lot of people talking about Tesla. So Tesla, we have a major dip going down, but overall, it just, it just looks like it’s just a little, a little breather because our traffic lights are still red. There’s no turnover here. So we’re just seeing a small little, a smaller pullback, but eventually this will pop back up. These green lights are just phenomenal and they’re extremely powerful when I have short, mid and long term basically aligning saying, yeah, this is going to go up.

So I trust my software, I trust my indicators, and I really believe that this will continue to rise, even though it has a good 10%, 15% pullback, that’s normal because if you look at the behavior of this particular stock, look at this pullback here, another pullback here and it shot back up. There’s a pullback here and it shot back up. There was a massive pullback here and it shot back up. So it is a volatile stock. It is a volatile stock. So if you’re in Tesla, just know that it could move 20, 25% on the up or down.

So that’s just normal. That is just normal, guys. For those of you that are in TMF with me, that’s the wrong one. Let’s take a look at TMF. It’s been taking a beating, making me look bad. Yep. And here we are. It’s going down even more because they’re possibly raising interest rates. Isn’t this crazy? They’re probably going to be raising interest rates again. Like that’s what Wall Street is fearing. But we all know they need a lower interest rate. So it’s a waiting game. If you’re in it, I’m in it too. We have till next year.

Hopefully this thing takes off, but it’s not a pretty looking stock right now for me. I’m losing my butt on this one, but I am going to be patient and write it out and I’ll be talking about it all the time. As you guys know, I’m not perfect. I’m really good at what I do, but I’m not perfect and there are some things that just don’t go the way I think it’s going to go. And I’m okay to admit that. But yeah, we got in around 45 and right now it’s at 39.

I honestly feel this thing will take off as soon as interest rates start to fall off again, this is going to pop back up. So we’ll see. We’ll see. We’ll just play the waiting game on that one. For those of you that are interested in gold, what’s an update on gold? Still looking good. We’re starting to get a little bit of weakening in the gold area, but we got green traffic lights all over, so that’s pretty powerful. And I also like silver. I like silver better than gold just because of the price point and they’re highly correlated.

So we got some correction here, correction territory. We got a pink box basically means that there’s a death cross coming up possibly soon. And that moving average, the price will come over, that moving average, and basically we’ll start to see silver go down. It could go down to, I don’t know, 26, 27. We’ll see. Right now it’s at 30, 35, not a bad price. And I was telling people to sell up here around 31, $32. But it’s always good to sell high, guys. Always good to sell high, at least a portion. And then you can always buy back.

You can always buy back at a lower price. All right, so the other cool part is, I wanted to say real quick on the QQQs. For those of you that are in this, the QQQs. We have an account that mirrors this particular ETF, which is the NASDAQ. And the NASDAQ is incredible. The returns have been ridiculous. Let me show you this. I’ve been sharing this every podcast because I just think it’s amazing. So in 2025, we’re already up close to 1%. 24%, a 28%, a 23%, a 43%, a 21%, and 21%. And 2020, it did 43%, and 2019, it did 35%.

2018, negative 3%. And just know all the reds, we get a zero. So imagine if you could follow this account and only have the upsides and not the downside. Well, that’s what we offer at GreenMoneySolutions.com. You can go to GreenMoneySolutions.com, pick an option, and you can literally track the QQQ, which is a NASDAQ. Make 20%, 30% on average a year and have it locked in as your new principal. And yes, it’s inside of an insurance contract. So you’re getting the guarantees of an insurance company backing your money up, backing your principal up.

You get a contract saying, my principal is safe, guaranteed, locked, and stowed away. I mean, it doesn’t get better than that. It really doesn’t. Now that we have access to this, and it’s in all the states, except for North Carolina, sorry, my home state, I can’t tell you the name of the company, but you just give us a call. We can set you up. You can put as little as $20,000 in and let us sit there and accrue all this interest from the NASDAQ with no risk or no fees to your principal.

If that’s what you’d like, then give us a call, 813-448-3446. Or you can visit us at CortezWM.com. So my verse for today is 2 Corinthians 3-3. You are living letters written by Christ, not with ink, but by the spirit of the living God. How many times we just read and read and we don’t actually absorb what we read? Well, we absorb that spirit, and that spirit will continue to shed light by the first fruits. So when we have first fruits, people are able to benefit from your actual living word that’s inside of you.

I read a statistic the other day is when you actually read the word, depression goes down by like 35%, worry, anxiety goes down by 20, pornography, the inclination or the temptation of pornography actually goes down by 50%. Like all these amazing medicinal benefits just by reading God’s word. So I encourage you to accept Christ in your heart and be the spirit of the living God. Like He’s given you the Holy Spirit. As soon as you accept Him, He gives you the Holy Spirit. And we’re able to be fruit to others.

So that is my prayer for you is to be fruit, be salt, be the light. And we all are sinners, but as long as we have the Holy Spirit within us, we can be an impact to others. So that’s my aim for this podcast and for you is not only do we want to talk about financial stuff, but we also want to be an impact to others. Well, guys, I told you to be a short podcast today, this weekend. I hope you enjoy your weekend. I’m feeling a little better. I still haven’t shaved, but yeah, I had a stomach bug this whole week and it’s been terrible, but I’m out and about.

It’s going to be a good weekend. It’s really cold here in Tampa. It got down to 37 degrees last night, and I think it’s going to hit 40 degrees a night. So we don’t even have jackets here. Like this is the shirt I wear. It’s a thick shirt. I don’t even own a jacket. So when it gets cold here, we’re busting out all these old sweaters that we’ve had from like the 90s. And it’s pretty funny. But anyways, God bless you guys. I’m out of here and we’ll talk soon. [tr:trw].

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