If you’re not an analyst or asset manager who specializes in the financial sector, and you don’t count on AIG (AIG), Lehman Brothers (LEH) , or their many near competitors for a paycheck, right now might be a good time to take a step back, breathe a little, and thank whatever deity or lucky totem you might carry, touch, or kiss for your good fortune.

It’s now September, the kids are back in school, Wall Street is in a shambles, and the last few folks who didn’t realize it are now quite aware that the responsibility for their financial futures lies only with themselves, and that risk is a real four-letter word, not just something that increases your returns.

I was very intrigued to see that Absolut has finally been sold, and it makes me wonder: is this the "top" for the premium, marketing-driven vodka market?

Now this is just a crazy theory, so feel free to ignore me. But here's my rationale:

Does anyone still remember when the one thing investors tried to avoid like the plague was a commodity investment?

So I'm being a little bit facetious here, but it strikes me that with commodities taking a bit of a hit recently on fears of a recession (or something much worse, depending on who you talk to, and on whether or not you work at Bear Stearns), maybe we're going to have to look at what "commodity" really means.

The stock market is presenting all kinds of buying opportunities that are catching my interest this week, but the one dynamic that stood out most for me on Tuesday was the dramatic difference between the performance of two companies in my portfolio that sell high tech products that both do essentially the same thing, but in very different ways.

Accuray (ARAY) is the maker of the Cyberknife, a targeted radiation machine for cancer treatments that has been called the "Cancer Blaster" by newsletter touts who enthusiastically recommend the stock. Though useful for all kinds of radiation treatments, the argument for this more advanced machine is that it can track moving tumors and spare nearby tissue, making it particularly popular for prostate and lung cancers (since the lungs, you know, move, and the prostate is in, shall we say, a very delicate area of the body).

I don't want to pile on the Sears Holdings (SHLD) boo-fest that happened across all financial media on Thursday morning - but I thought I'd share a few thoughts I had about Eddie Lampert, and what I think are some mistakes he might have made recently. These are mistakes that are certainly similar to the kinds of things individual investors, myself included, do to sabotage themselves every day.

What we have seen from Sears Holdings, Eddie Lampert's primary holding and the stock that was supposed to be his investment vehicle as he built a Warren Buffett-like empire, has been nothing short of dismal. The shares are now about 50% below the high that they hit back in May, primarily because the actual Sears and Kmart stores are doing terribly. They are suffering from weak sales, weak earnings, and, frankly, stores that no one could be excited about visiting.

The world of newsletter email advertising is a big one, with lots of money swirling around, but it's not all that complicated. You can see the same triggers bring about the same effect time and time again.

And one of the biggest triggers for many investors is the price of oil -- high oil prices, especially as they move through psychological barriers like $90 a barrel or, for gas, $3 a gallon, tend to make investors highly attuned to that sector. If you're paying through the nose, shouldn't there be a way for you to get rich from that?

On Wednesday, Steve Schwarzman spoke at the Merrill Lynch conference, and I think some of what he said about his company, Blackstone, has been overlooked in the wash of John Thain rumors. As a result, I picked up a few shares of Blackstone the same day.

So what did he say that was interesting?

On Thursday, I heard an adviser on Bloomberg Radio, but unfortunately, I tuned in too late to catch his name, but he had a very interesting investment thesis that I thought I should explore a little bit.

He essentially said that though the rust belt is suffering, the farm belt is booming and clearly, the two are linked somewhat, especially in the middle when you look from Ohio through Michigan, Indiana and Illinois. My guess is that if you're going by farming revenues, the further west you go in the Midwest, the stronger the economy is likely to be.

I owned a few shares of Sears Holdings (SHLD) a couple years ago, and sold them at more or less the same price they're going for today. I didn't make much money on them, but more or less broke even because I reconsidered my investment thesis in Sears, and decided that I had already missed the Kmart/Sears real-estate fueled run. In retrospect, I missed a nice run over the ensuing year or so before the shares fell back down to their current levels.

That remarkable run of a few years back, when Lampert re-engineered Kmart and monetized its real estate holdings, and used it to merge with Sears, made many people rich. Martin Whitman at Third Avenue famously bet big on the company, and did extremely well.

I woke up Wednesday morning, and found that Tencent (TCEHF.PK), one of my positions increased about 15% in value, with absolutely no particularly relevant news that I'm aware of. Huh?

Tencent, one of the largest internet companies in China (it is listed in Hong Kong), climbed about 15% as those of us in the Western hemisphere rested our weary heads. What's going on?

I recently spent a couple weeks pondering over my opinions about Canadian trusts, and just as I'm finishing up a little post on them, boom, there goes my thunder. First, Abu Dhabi buys up PrimeWest (PWI) at a big premium and catches everyone's attention, and then, I hear Jim Cramer turned back to the trusts again last Wednesday on Mad Money.

Surprisingly enough, the PrimeWest buyout offer didn't really move the prices of most of the other trusts.

I have somewhat of a tendency to buy popular growth stocks on pullbacks. If I believe the growth story, my knee jerk reaction is to often pick up a few shares or a few call options when what appears to be a temporary setback brings the share price down.

This is what happened when I doubled my Google (GOOG) holdings at $510 or so when its earnings disappointed slightly. And, although I haven't gotten around to writing about it yet, this is the same thing I recently did with Apple (AAPL) when the "sell the news" drop hit AAPL shares when the iPhone price cut freaked everyone out, and let me pick up shares in the mid-$130s (perhaps it's for the best that I didn't write about it ... who on earth wants to hear yet another blogger talking about Apple, by far the most popular stock for online discussion? I can't say that I have anything new to add to that debate).

This has been an interesting exercise in some more active investing for me - essentially trading in and out of the Morgan Stanley China A Shares (CAF) closed end fund a couple times this year, which is much more active than I tend to be with most of my holdings.

If you've been following my transactions, you might have noted that I bought shares in CAF back in May at about $36, sold at about $55, then re-bought shares at about $61.

Many people talk about how important it is to buy shares of companies that have strong family or management ownership, because that means there is someone intimately involved with the day to day operations who has the same motivation as common shareholders.

And I agree... in general. But when a family or individual has a real majority of the shares, or a majority of the voting shares, you can sometimes get into trouble. So here we have a rare opportunity to hear a shareholder be a little bit grumpy about an event that has caused a one-day 10% move UP in one of his stocks.

Well, one day -- actually a little bit less than 24 hours -- after I bought shares of the Morgan Stanley China A Shares closed end fund again, and the market tries to force some decisionmaking on me.

Why? Because the domestic Chinese stock market remains largely cut off from and uninfluenced by the rest of the world's markets.

Like a sloppy drunk returning to the roulette table, I've repurchased a position in the Morgan Stanley China A Share Closed End Fund (CAF).

Those who've been keeping up here (not so many of you, since I keep neglecting to post in a timely fashion), will remember that I bought these in the Spring because the discount was ridiculous, then sold when the discount shrunk to about 15% and the price was up well over 50%.

As we gird our loins for what appears to be an extremely unsteady market - though whether it will go up or down, I have no idea - I've taken the opportunity to simplify my investments a little bit.

What does that mean?

There are a few candidates in recent months:

I bought CAF because the pessimism over the domestic China market was overwrought, and the discount was too steep. Since then, the shares have gone up about 45%, and the discount has closed to about 11-12% depending on the price you use. I'm willing to sell here, since this was intended to be a short-term trade to take advantage of what seemed to me to be too much pessimism. I agree with most people who believe that the A shares market is bound to correct significantly at some point, though I expect it will be later than anyone thinks right now (I can't see the shares really correcting until Chinese residents get permission to invest elsewhere). Still, I wanted a short-term gain and got it, so I've sold.

I've been a Google shareholder for about two and a half years, but I did sell a portion of my holdings about 18 months ago - taking profits after my one year holding period partly because I was nervous about short term pricing, and partly because Google had become by far my largest holding.