Jim:    Do you want to go 60 miles per hour comfortably?... Or do you want to go 287 miles an hour and get scared out of your wits?...

Do you want to be able to ignore a conference call or two, and still be safe in the notion that your company's brand is unassailable... or do you want to have to pay attention to minutia... to things like demurage, like car loads, like flooding, like snow storms... how about terminal dwell?...

Do you want to be firm in the knowledge that there will never be a Chinese competitor... some East Asian knockoff of your company's products?...

Or do you want to pay attention to every percentage amount of Chinese growth?... Every dollar amount of coal, and every pound of fertilizer shipped... not to mention whether Honda or GM are moving some cars...

Welcome to the kind of questions and constrasts you have to deal with on your own as an investor...

I'd love to come out here every night and tell you what to do, but you know what?... You can't rely on me, or anyone else for that matter, because we can't tell you what your own preferences are...

You have to know yourself... I may not seem like a very zen buddhist guy but, when it comes to picking stocks, that's a rule you can't afford to avoid...

Alright, so what brings us all to this?...

Today, on Mad Money at the Half... I spoke to two excellent CEOs... who have been delivering fantastic results for two very different companies... One is Heinz (HNZ), which is up 60% over the last five years... And the other is the CSX Corp. (CSX)... the railroad that gained 287% in the same period!

Now there is no doubt in my mind or yours... that we would rather nail a 287% return than a 60% return... but there's a price to pay... the wildness, the volatility... we call it by a Greek letter... the beta... that causes us, at times, to take huge losses, in order to make the big 287% gains... Of course, those losses are on paper, and not realized...

HNZ, at $51.99 stock, trades in increments of pennies, okay...

Now CSX trades at $61.96...

That one trades in increments of dollars...

Let me go into the contrast a bit more in-depth today...

HNZ reported a sweet, terrific quarter this morning, one that I congratulated its CEO, Bill Johnson, for delivering...

The company had remarkable sales growth... The top 15 products grew at 17%... 13% of their growth was organic... Hey, get this... Ore Ida fries were up 30% year-over-year!... Man! Are we getting fat!...

They're innovating and they're selling and they're breaking into whole new markets like Latin America, China, India and Russia...

So what did HNZ stock do after that blowout number?... It was up, uh... 28 cents... after all that hard work and great numbers... up 28 cents.

Compare that today with CSX, which didn't announce a thing... didn't do a thing... and, for all I know, the trains didn't even run on time today...

And what did that stock do?...

It jumped $1.57... 2.6%!...

I mean, come on!... They just went around and did nothing and they made much more money than HNZ did... because commodities were up... they ship commodities... perhaps it was the dollar... It was weaker and they ship overseas... Who the heck knows! We don't even know...

Now, another day, that same move up could just as easily have been a decline of the same size... and we'd be similarly clueless... I could make up a reason... I often feel like that people make up reasons... No, it was just up!...

.  .  .  .  .

So, before you buy a stock, you need to ask yourself, what can you handle?... You need to know, do you want to own a company with a stock, where you'll never have to worry about waking up and going to the diner...

Do you want a stock that, when it doesn't do well, doesn't go down much?... Or when it does do well, like it did this morning, tends to move up slowly over time?... Or do you want to take a ride on a real train?... Do you want to take a ride on the CSX express! Strap yourself in and get some great gains at the risk of some hideous...

I don't have the answer for you, whether you like CSX like the trainwreck, or whether you like HNZ, and you just want to have something pretty good on your fries... I don't, because there's something to be said for owning the stocks of iconic brands that will do well over time... and you won't have to worry about the Baltic Freight Index, or the price of DAP - that's a fertilizer ingredient - or whether Honda's shipping a lot of cars or not... or lumber...

You still have to do a little homework for HNZ, but the homework is, well... let's just say it's much less demanding than CSX...

With CSX, all those great percentage points you got, you had to worry about a Chinese slowdown... you had to worry about housing starts... you had to worry about storms, which cost them a couple of pennies sometimes... you have to worry about labor problems... Or maybe you just want a product that they're just discovering in China, like HNZ...

You see the bottom line is this...