Billionaire T. Boone Pickens’s High Upside Potential Picks Include Phillips 66 (PSX)

While the trailing P/E multiple is a useful value metric, it does not take a company’s future growth prospects into account. If an investor doesn’t mind incorporating a little more uncertainty into their analysis, they can also consider the PEG ratio, which is based on the P/E multiple and on analyst expectations for future earnings growth and is therefore a way to measure a stock’s upside potential. We track quarterly 13F filings from hundreds of hedge funds and other notable investors, including billionaire T. Boone Pickens (a former oilman who now manages BP Capital). These filings can be used to develop investing strategies (for example, the most popular small cap stocks among hedge funds outperform the S&P 500 by an average of 18 percentage points per year) and we also like to screen individual filings according to a number of criteria. Here are our thoughts on Pickens’s five largest holdings as of the end of March in stocks with five-year PEG ratios less than 1 (or see the full list of his stock picks).

Oil and gas refining and marketing company Tesoro Corporation (NYSE:TSO), which has more than doubled in the last year, was one of the largest new holdings in Pickens’s portfolio during Q1. Tesoro Corporation (NYSE:TSO) trades at 10 times trailing earnings, and with Wall Street analysts expecting net income to increase over the next several years the stock’s five-year PEG ratio comes in at 0.8. We would note that while earnings increased strongly in the first quarter of 2013 versus a year earlier, revenue was up by only 3% though of course the stock is priced cheaply as it is.

BP Capital was also buying Marathon Petroleum Corp (NYSE:MPC), which was spun out of Marathon Oil to manage the company’s refining and marketing assets and is currently up about 90% from shortly after becoming publicly traded. As with Tesoro- and, frankly, many other companies in the industry- Marathon Petroleum Corp (NYSE:MPC) is priced in value territory with both the trailing and forward earnings multiples being only 7. At that valuation the company would like quite attractive as long as it could prove capable of maintaining its current business.

Another downstream oil and gas company which Pickens liked was Phillips 66 (NYSE:PSX) with the filing disclosing a position of about 80,000 shares. Phillips 66 (NYSE:PSX) is how Warren Buffett has been playing a refining and marketing thesis, as Berkshire Hathaway had nearly $2 billion invested in the company according to its own 13F (find Buffett’s favorite stocks). The company is valued at 8 times earnings, whether we compare its stock price to trailing results or to analyst consensus for 2014. While earnings doubled in its last quarterly report compared to Q1 2012, revenue was actually down 10%.