To go , dine in or take out?

Waiting in the line for Olive garden I witnessed atleast ten groups of people marching outside, all of whom had a take out bag with them.

The financial part of me started thinking about the comparative costs of take-outs, dine-in or the to-gos.

A typical dinner menu at a restaurant like Olive garden varies from around $11-$12 to around $20 . This might not include appetizers based on what you chose. For an average price of $15 with taxes and tip we round up around $36 for a dinner for two.


If you take do take left overs home and use it as next days lunch it counts for $36 /4 which on an average is $9 per person which is not that bad. However if your intention is to cover next day's meal with the leftovers then this is not a bad choice unless ofcourse you are too hungry or your whole intention was to spend time together and did not care about take-out.

On the other hand if you go for a buffett at a restaurant at night the pitfall is you pay the price pretty much for that meal and cannot take-out. That being said specials like the Sweet Tomatoes deals for $8.79 dinner specials still end up around the $9-10 average per meal.

Can take-outs be cheaper? Answer is it depends. If you already have some food and want something more substantial to make a meal,say like left over curry, combind with the fact that you want to watch a favourite movie at home then yes it makes sense to take out. Moneywise you might save tip if you are the kind who does not tip take outs.

This is ofcourse comparing restaurants of reasonably similar standards and not comparing fast-food or subway type of food outlets.

Ofcourse at the end it depends where you are comfortable and would like to eat.

Market correction analysis

In my previous blog I mentioned that I was looking for a market correction around 12000. We did not have a correction at 12000 but we went ahead to around 12400 before make a dive and recent earthquake in Japan has left the down below 12000. If you take a look at a six month picture of the DOW we see a similar pattern in the last market correction in Novemeber 2010 when the DOW corrected from 11400 to 11000.

Should you be buying in this market dip?

Long term investors may look at this as a buying opportunity and short term traders may well think of looking to get in for few days. With previous market corrections some aggressive strategies that did well were finding most beaten down stocks in the current market correction.

Recently I have been following James Stewart from Smart Money. In his latest article he suggest these growth stocks when market makes a 10% correction which means a 2541 on the NASDAQ.

Market bears look at the volatility and uncertainty over impact of the Japan earthquake and predict that markets might go down further.

Last few days have seen some selling at high volumes and volatility which means there might be further downside potential. What are your thoughts? Will you be buying in at these levels?


Fibonacci series for this last bull run from 11000 to 12400 for the DOW returns 11544 as the 61.8% mark at which some support could be seen with the DOW bumping on these levels.

As for long investing I would add positions into my long term portfolio.