MTY is one of North America’s leading franchisors in the restaurant industry. Given the unfavourable macroeconomic conditions (high rates, inflation, consumer pressures) the growth of the stock has slowed. It does trade at very low multiples however which may understate a potential recovery and/or and acquisition. We are maintaining our rating of ‘B’

GDI is one of the largest outsourced facility service providers in North America. A weak acquisition pipeline along with organic revenue decline led to weakening sales growth over the last few quarters. This meaningful slowdown in topline growth caused investors concern, as most of the value creation came from the compounding growth in earnings, and whether GDI could resume its growth playbook over the next few years is still highly uncertain. We are downgrading our rating by one notch to “B”.

BNS has established itself as a leading bank in the Americas offering a broad range of services and products such as personal and commercial banking, wealth management and private banking, corporate and investment banking, and capital markets. The Bank employs 89,239 workers, has 2,279 branches and offices, and 8,584 automated-banking-machines (ABMs). BNS is the cheapest Canadian Bank and also pays the highest yield. We think further multiple expansion could occur as BNS executes on its strategy and continues to string together earnings beats. With a positive outlook we are maintain our rating of an A-.