Billionaire Julian Robertson’s Top Stock Picks Include Google Inc (GOOG), H&R Block, Inc. (HRB)

Robertson disclosed ownership of about 580,000 shares of HCA Holdings Inc (NYSE:HCA), a large owner of hospitals. While recent financial performance at HCA has been weak, the industry in general carries fairly low multiples and this particular company is valued at 13 times its trailing earnings. Leverage is high, which likely provides a lot of explanation for why a hospital stock (we’d expect the hospital business to have little dependence on broader economic conditions) has a beta of 1.9. It might be worth comparing HCA to its peers to find healthier alternatives in the industry.

According to the filing, the billionaire kept his holdings of Valeant Pharmaceuticals Intl Inc (NYSE:VRX) about constant between January and March at close to 290,000 shares. Valeant is a pharmaceutical company with a market capitalization of $27 billion. While revenue rose 25% last quarter compared to the first quarter of 2012 on strong product sales, Valeant was still unprofitable and in fact its pretax losses were much larger than they had been a year ago. Despite this, the stock price has risen 86% in the last year.

We still think that we would avoid Valeant, and as we’ve suggested we wouldn’t be comfortable buying Mastercard or H&R Block, Inc. (NYSE:HRB) at this time either. HCA might be worth a look, but we suspect that there are other stocks in the industry with similarly cheap multiples and stronger recent performance. As for Google Inc (NASDAQ:GOOG), we certainly see the company continuing to grow its earnings but the valuation is high enough that we aren’t sure that it still makes for a good growth pick.

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