MORGAN STANLEY

HighTower Advisors, a firm consolidating wealth management businesses across the United States, on Monday said it added a team of advisers from Morgan Stanley Smith Barney in northern Virginia.

Wall Street banks are reported to post poor second quarter results this week, accounting for nearly a 20 percent drop in sales and trading revenues and prompting another round of layoffs, according to the New York Times.

Dunkin' Brands, owner of Dunkin' Donuts, is nearing its IPO. Shares are expected to be priced between $16 and $18 per share. The stock will trade on the NASDAQ under the symbol DNKN.

Google was downgraded on Friday after analysts expressed concerns over the company's spending and non-core businesses, sending shares of the Internet giant plummeting.

Large Wall Street banks are starting to scale back compensation on trading desks as shareholders grow increasingly restless over weak returns.

Morgan Stanley downgraded Google Inc a notch to equal-weight, saying the search giant's margins will shrink as it undertakes aggressive hiring and ramps up advertising for new products.

The companies whose shares are moving in pre-market trade on Friday are: Travelers Companies, Chesapeake Energy, Analog Devices, Frontier Communications, TJX Companies, Marathon Petroleum, United Technologies, MEMC Electronic Materials, Google, Kohl's and Denbury Resources.

Pharmaceutical giant Pfizer (PFE) is considering selling its animal health and baby food units in hopes of appeasing shareholders' demands.

Morgan Stanley's wealth management arm for the super-rich hired a former Merrill Lynch private banking executive, Devon Baranski, to lead its U.S. Southwest region, according to an internal memo obtained by Reuters.

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The companies whose shares are moving in pre-market trade on Thursday are: Target Corp, Limited Brands, Urban Outfitters, Macy's, Gap, Sprint Nextel, Chesapeake Energy, Corning, Yum! Brands and Wellpoint Inc.

Brokerage Morgan Stanley Smith Barney, a joint venture between Morgan Stanley and Citigroup , said personal information of 34,000 investment clients stored on two CDs was lost in transit to a government office last month, the Wall Street Journal reported citing a company spokesman.

An arbitration panel ordered a Merrill Lynch clearing unit to pay $63.7 million in damages to California hedge fund manager Rosen Capital Partners LP as compensation for losses during the 2008 financial crisis.

A FINRA securities industry arbitration panel ordered a former Morgan Stanley Smith Barney broker to pay the firm nearly $1 million for breaching the terms of a promissory note.

Stocks were mostly flat in a thinly traded session on Tuesday as investors digested gains accrued last week, the best week for equities in two years, while strength in Netflix helped lift the Nasdaq.

Wall Street consolidated on Tuesday after its best week in two years with choppy, low-volume trading seen during the rest of the summer.

Zynga Inc, developer of popular Facebook games like FarmVille and Mafia Wars, is all set to hit the capital market with an initial public offer (IPO). The company filed with regulators for an IPO of up to $1 billion on Friday, hopping that its close ties with Facebook will be a key to its future success.

Zynga Inc filed paperwork on Friday for an initial public offering, the latest in a series of hot social media companies to seek capital in the U.S. public markets.

The company behind Farmville, Mafia Wars, Words With Friends, Empires and Allies and many other social games has officially filed for an IPO. In doing so, it follows in the footsteps of fellow social comapny, LinkedIn, which had an impressive IPO of its own last month.

Google Inc. (Nasdaq: GOOG) is engaged in preliminary talks to acquire Hulu, the online video company, according to a report in the Los Angeles Times, citing unnamed sources familiar with the negotiations.

A lower-priced iPhone dubbed the Lite version kicked up dust over the weekend. The talk outlined the prospect of Apple embarking on a price war, probably aimed at keeping carriers by its side as smartphone battle is getting tougher by the day.