Good afternoon, and a belated welcome to November!

In October, the S&P 500 gained 8% and the Dow Jones Industrial Average, which rose 14%, had its best monthly return since January 1976.

I doubt anyone is jumping for joy, however. U.S. stocks are still down 18% (counting dividends) in 2022.

And I don't recommend extrapolating October's gains. The five best months for the U.S. stock market since 1885 all came during the Great Depression:

Those giant monthly gains must have been some consolation to investors in the 1930s, but they weren't a harbinger of a new bull market.

With Thanksgiving almost upon us, we should be grateful that our portfolios have recovered a bit. But investors shouldn't take October's gains as a definitive sign that the worst must be over.

If investing in 2022 had an official slogan, I would propose: "Hope for the best but expect the worst." 

My latest column, "You Don't Know What You Don't Know About Your Financial Adviser," explores something I never knew myself until now: Many registered investment advisers are not required to disclose customer complaints, arbitration claims or civil lawsuits.

I found that surprising, and so did many advisers who wrote in to tell me this was the first they'd ever heard of it.

"Damn! That’s news to me and shocking (and embarrassing that I didn’t know)," emailed Harold Evensky of Evensky & Katz / Foldes in Coral Gables, Fla.

"I spent 37 years at brokerage firms, worked with RIAs and was not aware of this obvious reporting problem," emailed Jim Chin of Jenks, Okla.

I've written about conducting due diligence on an adviser here and here. 

Now, however, I think you need to ask a couple of new questions:

• Have clients filed written complaints or arbitration claims against you or your firm?
• Have you or your firm been sued by clients?

Get the answers in writing. You shouldn't be scared out of hiring a financial adviser if you feel you need one; a good adviser can work wonders. But what I've just learned persuades me that you have to be more careful hiring the right one.

In the latest in our series on the origins and history of financial terms, let’s look at money. (You can find links to the previous posts, on the words stock, fee, cash and inflation, here.)

Our words money and mint both come from the Latin moneta, which is probably of Phoenician origin, linguist Anatoly Liberman of the University of Minnesota recently told me.

In the ancient world, it was common to transact in lumps or dust of precious metal weighed on a dangling pan-balance or scale, rather than in coins with fixed denominations.

As the First Book of Samuel says:
And the servant answered Saul again, and said, Behold, I have here at hand the fourth part of a shekel of silver: that will I give to the man of God, to tell us our way.

Saul’s servant hadn’t chopped a coin in four pieces; he was using shekel not to describe a unit of currency, but a weight or quantity of silver. (Even in modern Israel, where the shekel is the national currency, l’shakel means “to weigh.”)

Another unit of weight for measuring payments in Biblical times was the mina (equal to 60 shekels, probably weighing roughly one pound).

That word comes from the Hebrew verb manah, which meant to number, reckon, count or allocate, as in the beautiful verse from Psalm 90: “So teach us to number our days, that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom.”

A related term, Meni, appears once in the Bible, in Isaiah 65:11. Literally meaning “the counter” or “the allocator,” the name seems to refer to a pagan idol of Fortune that allotted a portion of life to each person. 

The Phoenician goddess of fortune and luck, Menit, whose name stems from the same root, also weighed and parceled out the destiny of her followers.

Her name appears to have inspired one epithet, or nickname, for the Roman goddess Juno, wife of Jupiter and queen of heaven. As Juno Moneta, she presided over the empire’s mint, which was situated in her temple complex in Rome.

Unsurprisingly, Moneta was often shown on coins wielding a scale to weigh money -- and, perhaps, souls.

Juno Moneta was the goddess who guaranteed Roman mortals that the empire's coinage, weights and measures would be accurate and fair. As the goddess who counted, she seems to have overseen the census as well.

The ancient Romans thought the name Moneta was based on the Latin word moneo, although modern linguists dispute that. Moneo meant to warn, advise or remember.

And money isn’t just a way of counting or keeping score; it also warns, advises and remembers.

In “The Fall of Hyperion,” an epic he wrote (and abandoned) in 1819, the great English poet John Keats describes Moneta as a lonely ghost full of sorrow. The goddess was “the pale Omega of a withered race,” blanched whiter than “the lily and the snow,” yet with “high tragedy in the dark secret chambers of her skull.”

Moneta is haunted by warnings and memories. “My power, which to me is still a curse,” she tells the poet, “shall be to thee a wonder,” as she lets him see her vision of the remembered realm of Saturn.

It’s ironic that Keats, who was so poor that he became a prototype of the starving artist, chose the goddess of money to escort him through the underworld in his search for wisdom.

The more intangible money becomes in a world of credit cards, spending apps and digital currencies, the harder it becomes to remember the tangible meanings embedded so deeply in the history of the word.

Would we so often spend casually and invest carelessly if we learned from the history of the word that money is inseparable from counting and measuring, memory and luck?

As Thanksgiving approaches, what are you thankful for as an investor? (I wrote about my own gratitude a few years ago here.)

To share your thoughts, just reply to this email. Please include your name and location. Replies may be lightly edited for clarity or brevity. Thanks, and Happy Thanksgiving!

Be well and invest well,

Jason

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Patience serves as a protection against wrongs as clothes do against cold. For if you put on more clothes as the cold increases it will have no power to hurt you. So in like manner you must grow in patience when you meet with great wrongs, and they will then be powerless to vex your mind.
—Leonardo da Vinci