The Globe and Mail reports in its Friday edition that shareholders of Couche-Tard may be better off if the bid to acquire 7-Eleven's Japanese parent company falls through. Guest columnist Robert Tattersall writes that a recently published book titled The M&A Failure Trap: Why Most Mergers and Acquisitions Fail and How the Few Succeed backs up shareholder concerns. The authors, finance and accounting professors Baruch Lev and Feng Gu, created a database of 40,000 M&A transactions over the 43 years from 1980 through 2022, introduced 42 variables which might possibly have an impact on the success or failure of a transaction and then ran a regression analysis to see which of them had any predictive value. In their words, a successful acquisition is one which achieves above industry-average sales growth or gross-margin growth, a positive stock price return and no goodwill write-off, all during the three-year period after the date of the transaction. Using this definition on the 40,000-item database, they found that 70 to 75 per cent of transactions fail to meet expectations. Tellingly for Couche-Tard investors, the authors found that deal size is a strong indicator: Negative and increasingly so as the size grows.