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The listing -- which could be the largest to date in London and one of the largest in Europe -- will force the Swiss-based firm to shed its once-fabled secrecy and open up its huge and successful mining and trading operations to increased scrutiny.

It will also create massive paper wealth, dissolving the group's partnership structure and handing the 485 employees who own the group millions of dollars on average in shares -- though all are expected to be locked in for at least a year, with top management unable to sell for five years.

Glencore is expected to list roughly a 20 percent stake, which, along with short lock-ups on some of the existing shares, would give it the free float necessary to secure a spot in London's top share index.

Sources familiar with the matter have said Glencore and its advisors are working to issue the ITF document in London around mid-April -- this week -- though that could still be delayed.

ITFs, which are not a legal requirement, vary from brief statements setting out little more than a company's sketched plan to list at some stage to hefty documents listing details on timing, finances and management.

Glencore is expected to provide extensive detail, including the name of its new chairman. The Sunday Times named Simon Murray, a Hong Kong businessman and former French foreign legionnaire, as a frontrunner among three candidates.

Murray, currently chairman of Asian private equity firm GEMS, could not be reached for comment on Sunday.

Glencore, which has kept its plans under wraps since briefing analysts more than a month ago, has consistently declined to comment on the timeline of any IPO. The firm also declined to comment on Sunday on the search for a chairman.

"MUST OWN" IN TURBULENT MARKETS?

Sources familiar with the situation have said the firm, valued by one analyst at about $60 billion, has held "positive" talks with investors in recent weeks, and these are expected to have included discussions with potential "cornerstone" investors for the Hong Kong portion of the listing.

Citi (C.N), Morgan Stanley (MS.N) and Credit Suisse (CSGN.VX) are likely to serve as joint global co-ordinators, with Bank of America Merrill Lynch (BAC.N) and BNP Paribas (BNPP.PA) as bookrunners. Barclays Capital (BARC.L), Societe Generale (SOGN.PA) and UBS (UBSN.VX) are likely to make up a third tier of banks advising on the IPO, according to sources familiar with the matter.

Markets, however, remain tough.

Although equities markets have rebounded since a spike in volatility last month on fears of a nuclear crisis in Japan and unrest in the Arab world, bankers say investor willingness to back IPOs in general remains limited.

"The tail risks are still quite elevated with concerns over the Middle East, the oil price, the Portuguese bailout, aftershocks in Japan," said one. "The market is very jumpy."

With just over an hour to spare before a midnight deadline, Obama's Democrats and opposition Republicans agreed on Friday to a budget compromise that will cut about $38 billion in spending for the last six months of this fiscal year.

After signing the stopgap spending bill to keep the federal government running until the deal can be formally approved in the coming days, Obama underscored the fact that Washington was open with a surprise visit to the Lincoln Memorial.

"I just wanted to say ... that because Congress was able to settle its difference, that's why this place is open today and everybody's able to enjoy their visit," he told cheering tourists from the monument steps.

Friday night's agreement -- after a furious battle over spending and social issues like abortion rights -- averted a shutdown that would have weakened the U.S. economic recovery, forced furloughs for some 800,000 federal employees, delayed paychecks for troops in Afghanistan and Iraq, and closed national parks and monuments.

Obama said the pact involved painful compromises. "I would not have made these cuts in better circumstances. But we also prevented this important debate from being overtaken by politics and unrelated disagreements on social issues," he said in his weekly radio address.

DEFICIT WOES

The deal angered some Democrats, who said it unfairly punished working-class Americans as they deal with the lingering effects of a steep economic recession, after Obama agreed to a deal in December that cut taxes for the rich.

"These things are bad. I think it's also bad for the American economy," Representative Eliot Engel said on MSNBC.

Republicans lost no time in stressing the deal did not mean they were ready to compromise as the government grapples with a deficit expected to hit $1.4 trillion this year.

"Washington has not been telling you the truth about the magnitude of the problems we are facing," Representative Paul Ryan, who has announced a budget plan to save $6 trillion over the next decade, partly by cutting government-run health programs for the poor and elderly, said in the Republicans' Saturday radio address.

The White House made clear it was looking ahead to the next funding fights. Senior administration officials told reporters the deal was a sign the parties could work together on issues like increasing the debt ceiling and cutting the deficit.

"(There's a) very important message tonight to the American people and hope for the future that our leaders can come together and ... produce what is the biggest annual spending cut in the history of the country," one said.

The government could hit the current $14.3 trillion limit on its borrowing authority by mid-May and will need Congress to approve another increase in that debt ceiling.

Congress must also approve a budget for the next fiscal year, a fight likely to last well into the 2012 campaign season as Obama seeks a second term.

Dow component Alcoa will launch the earnings season after the closing bell on Monday in what is expected to be another solid round of corporate results.

The aluminum producer is expected to report quarterly earnings of 27 cents per share on revenue of $6.07 billion, according to Thomson Reuters estimates.

Some top financial names are also expected to report next week, including JPMorgan Chase & Co (JPM.N) and Bank of America Corp (BAC.N). Google Inc (GOOG.O) is also due to report.

"Earnings are what the market is all about. Earnings are critical in here, guidance is critical in here, the conference calls are critical in here," said Paul Mendelsohn, chief investment strategist at Windham Financial Services in Charlotte, Vermont.

"In terms of earnings and sectors, you basically want to be with those people who have the ability to raise prices or are participating in the commodity price increases," he said. "And you really don't want to be in those people who have the input costs increases and are going to see their margins squeezed by rising commodity prices.

Market analysts have found encouragement for a strong earnings season from the relatively light amount of company preannouncements, leading to the belief that surging commodity costs have yet to compress margins and impact corporate profits.

The Reuters/Jefferies CRB index rose 8 percent in the first quarter and is up 2.6 percent so far in April, and hit its highest level since September 2008.

The S&P 500 .SPX has recouped all of the losses suffered in the wake of the Japanese earthquake on March 11 but has been unable to convincingly muscle past the 1,333.58 level, a technical resistance point representing double the 12-year low hit on March 9, 2009.

The benchmark index was relatively flat for the week, down 0.3 percent, as the prospect of a government shutdown kept the rally at bay.

Investors braced for a possible government shutdown as the White House and Congress scrambled on Friday to break a budget impasse ahead of a midnight deadline. But analysts said that while a U.S. government shutdown, which would idle hundreds of thousands of federal workers, would be short-term negative, the market had managed to rally even ahead of the looming deadline.

"There is an intellectual concern of what it means to shut down the government and there is the uncertainty of how long does the government get shut down and how much of a (hit) do we take on GDP growth," said Phil Orlando, chief equity market strategist, at Federated Investors, in New York.

Many traders circled short-term puts on the SPDR S&P 500 Trust (SPY.P) as the prospect of a shutdown loomed.

Shares of the exchange-traded fund, also called the Spyders, fell 0.3 percent to $132.86 in afternoon trading on Friday. The fund's Weekly $133 puts traded more than 96,000 contracts, surpassing their open interest.

Frederic Ruffy, a strategist at WhatsTrading.com, said the positions likely reflected hedges against weakness due to fears of a shutdown.

The decision, which allows Google to expand into the online travel market, comes as new CEO Larry Page revamped the company's management structure in a bid to accelerate efforts in social networking, mobile and other key businesses.

The Justice Department blessed Google's $700 million deal with the ticketing software company. Google promised to license the software for five years, to continue to upgrade it, and to establish firewalls to protect ITA clients' intellectual property.

The ITA buy is part of an acquisition and hiring spree as Google aims to ensure its online services stay on top as Internet surfers go mobile and turn to services like the wildly popular Facebook.

Now, U.S. antitrust regulators will turn to the question of whether to open a formal antitrust probe into allegations that Google, the world's No. 1 Internet search engine, manipulates search results, a source told Reuters on Friday.

The Federal Trade Commission and Justice Department are both contemplating an investigation but there has been no decision made on which agency may take it up.

There has been a series of complaints made to the agencies -- many from Google rivals that specialize in searches such as price comparison websites -- that Google has made them difficult to find.

A key lawmaker has been critical of Google, and remained so on Friday. "We continue to scrutinize broader questions about the fairness of Google's search engine, and whether it preferences its own products and services to the detriment of competitors," said Sen. Herb Kohl, chairman of the Judiciary Committee's antitrust subcommittee.

The European Commission took up an antitrust probe after complaints from three small companies, one of them owned by Microsoft Corp. Microsoft filed a formal complaint against Google with the commission in Brussels last month.

Microsoft charged that Google hurt competition by "walling off" content on its YouTube site, so other search engines cannot display accurate results. It also said that Google made it hard for Microsoft's mobile phone software to show videos from YouTube, among other charges.

The Justice Department was also aware that Google had an incentive to tweak search results to favor its businesses and was keeping an eye on the issue, said a Justice Department official who requested anonymity.

"There were a variety of complaints about bias in search," the official said. "So, while we're aware of those complaints we did not think they were relevant to this (ITA) transaction."

Analysts said they believed that Google's power in search meant the company had to step carefully, and that a broader probe was a big worry.

"A lot of these new markets that they enter rely heavily on search to drive traffic," said Yun Kim, an analyst with Gleacher & Co. "That's what the government is worried about."

CONDITIONS PLACED ON GOOGLE BUY OF ITA