Billionaire Stephen Mandel’s Long Term Stock Picks Include Priceline.com Inc (PCLN)

We track quarterly 13F filings from hundreds of hedge funds and other notable investors, including billionaire and Tiger Cub Stephen Mandel’s Lone Pine Capital, as part of our work researching investment strategies (we have found, for example, that the most popular small cap stocks among hedge funds outperform the S&P 500 by an average of 18 percentage points per year). In addition, while we don’t recommend blindly following anybody, 13Fs can provide interesting insights into how individual managers view the market and what stocks they like. Of course, by now Lone Pine’s most recent 13F is fairly old (it discloses many of the fund’s long equity positions from the end of March) but we can use our database to find stocks that Mandel has owned for the last two years on the theory that he probably still owns these names. Read on for our quick take on the five largest positions from the most recent 13F which Lone Pine had at least $180 million invested in at the end of March 2011 or see the full list of stocks the fund reported owning.

Priceline.com Inc (NASDAQ:PCLN) was Mandel’s largest position according to the most recent 13F, and the travel website has in fact been quite popular among other Tiger Cubs as well; John Griffin’s Blue Ridge Capital, for example, owned about 450,000 shares at the end of Q1 (research more stocks Blue Ridge owns). Lone Pine began buying the stock about two years ago. Priceline.com Inc (NASDAQ:PCLN) trades at 31 times trailing earnings, but the company has continued to deliver strong growth with revenue and earnings both up over 25% from their levels a year ago going by recent reports. As such it’s still worth considering as a growth stock.

The fund slightly increased its holdings of Dollar General Corp. (NYSE:DG) between January and March, to a total of over 14 million shares. Growth has actually been somewhat low at the discount retailer, which is troubling from a value point of view when combined with the fact that the trailing earnings multiple is 19. We would note that Dollar General Corp. (NYSE:DG) has a beta of only 0.1 indicating that its stock price has almost no correlation with the overall market. Tiger Global Management initiated a position in Dollar General Corp. (NYSE:DG) in the first quarter of the year (check out Tiger Global’s stock picks).