Can they absorb Zabka Group?

Couche-Tard sits inside the top tenth of the TGI watchlist on the primary rank and higher still on dividend growth, with a payout ratio near ten percent. It arrived there in the same three months it agreed to acquire Poland's Żabka Group for approximately US$8.6 billion, the largest acquisition in its history, funded entirely with debt, and the first network it has promised not to absorb.

What the ranking system found

The primary TGI rank places this in the top tenth of a field of more than 900, with the Dividend Growth rank higher still and the Price Growth rank trailing both by a wide margin. Healthy Income sits far back for the obvious reason that the yield is under 1%. That spread is the finding: the same security ranks near the front of the field on what it pays and well behind on what it has returned in price, and the two rankings are measuring genuinely different things. The dividend growth row is where the real signal sits, because it decelerates almost monotonically as the measurement window shortens. Roughly 20% annualized over ten years, roughly 20% over five, under 17% over three, and about 12% over one. A single row of four numbers, read left to right, describes a company whose distribution growth has been stepping down for several years. The declared annual rates confirm it from the other direction: fiscal 2025 raised the dividend 14.3%, from CA 66.50 cents to CA 76.00 cents, and fiscal 2026 raised it 10.5%, from CA 76.00 cents to CA 84.00 cents, against a long-run rate in the low twenties. The payout ratio is what makes that pattern worth stopping on. It sits near 10%, and it has been falling, because fiscal 2026 earnings grew considerably faster than the dividend did. The company moved further from its capacity limit while slowing the raise. Whatever caused the deceleration, it was not the ability to pay. Two mechanical points about how this ranking is produced. The dividend and price growth percentages are computed from the company's native Canadian dollar history on the Toronto listing, which is the honest basis, because it measures what the business decided and delivered rather than what the currency market did to those figures afterward. And the dividend measure is trailing cash actually paid across a rolling window, not the annual rate a board announces, so a policy change takes about four quarters to fully express itself in a rank. A ranking built on declarations can be moved by a press release. One built on cash paid cannot be moved until the money has left the company.

I published a full spotlight on ATD here: https://totalgrowthinvesting.com/spotlight.php?symbol=ANCTF