Billionaire James Dinan’s New Stock Picks Include News Corp (NWSA), Virgin Media Inc. (VMED)

York reported owning 1.9 million shares of Hess Corp. (NYSE:HES) as of the beginning of April. Hess is another company where investors are looking for gains from a potential spinout- in this case, of the business’s downstream operations. At its current valuation of $23 billion, Hess trades at 11 times forward earnings estimates, which is even to slightly above where many other large oil and gas companies are trading. The most recent quarterly report showed very strong revenue and earnings numbers compared to the same period in the previous year.

Rounding out our list of York’s new stock picks was its 3.9 million shares of Hartford Financial Services Group Inc (NYSE:HIG). The property and casualty insurance company trades at a considerable discount to the book value of its equity, with a P/B ratio of 0.6. Even though business has not been great, this suggests that Hartford has significant upside potential merely from investors gradually coming to accept the company’s internal asset valuations. Analyst expectations for 2014 imply a forward P/E of 8, so Hartford is arguably a value play in that sense as well.

We’re quite interested in the opportunities at Hess and News Corp (NASDAQ:NWSA)- the valuations at each are low enough, compared to recent performance and these companies’ peers, that very little improvement from the special situation is required to make the stocks good values. Hartford also looks interesting, assuming that the company comes close to analyst forecasts for next year and does not see a large writedown in its assets. As for CBRE, we’ve noted the high earnings multiple but growth has certainly been high; we’d want to see that strong bottom-line performance continue, and may watch to see how its next quarterly results come out.

Disclosure: I own no shares of any stocks mentioned in this article.