Warren Buffett News: Hints At Hillary Clinton, Berkshire Hathaway Inc. (BRK.A)’s Rising Star & More

Yahoo’s Marissa Mayer auctioning off lunch for charity (BayouBuzz)
Following in the footsteps of Warren Buffett, Mayer will have lunch with a winning bidder to raise money for charity. Bidding site Charitybuzz is running the Mayer lunch auction , which received a bid of $41,500 shortly after it was posted on Tuesday. The one-hour lunch with Mayer will be held at Yahoo! Inc. (NASDAQ:YHOO)‘s Sunnyvale, Calif., headquarters. And yes, the winning bidder will be allowed to take photos. Mayer’s charity of choice is the Aspire East Palo Alto Charter School, a high-poverty California school. The charity will receive 80% of the winning bid after Charitybuzz takes its 20% cut, the site’s CEO Coppy Holzman told CNNMoney. The auction will end June 27.

Berkshire’s New Insurance Push Driven By Lack of Price Spikes (WSJ)
Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway Inc. (NYSE:BRK.A) is taking a big new plunge into the business-insurance sector in part because of a shift in the way the sector operates, a top executive at the company said. Mr. Buffett and his insurance lieutenant, Ajit Jain, have long been known for jumping into the commercial insurance sector when prices spike. But the executive leading Berkshire’s new push said Tuesday that significant price increases are becoming far less common because of how quickly fresh capital can be deployed to react to those price increases. That’s why Berkshire Hathaway Inc. (NYSE:BRK.A) is looking at “operationalizing our balance sheet in a more permanent way, long term,” said Peter Eastwood, who recently jumped to Berkshire from American International Group, Inc. (NYSE:AIG) to head the new effort.

What Warren Buffett should like about Shoppers Drug Mart (TheGlobeAndMail)
Toronto-based Shoppers Drug Mart Corporation licenses retail drug stores operating under the Shoppers Drug Mart and Pharmaprix names. It has a network of more than 1,240 stores across Canada, a $9.3-billion market cap and has taken in more than $10.7-billion in sales in the past year. Shoppers also licenses or owns 59 medical clinic pharmacies operating under the name Shoppers Simply Pharmacy or Pharmaprix Simplement Santé and six luxury beauty destinations operating as Murale. Validea’s Warren Buffett-based stock-picking model looks for increased earnings per share, which Shoppers’ has every year for the past decade. The Buffett model also likes that its average return on equity is over 15 per cent for past decade.