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Cyber Monday -- a term coined five years ago for the day many people return to work after Thanksgiving and make online gift purchases on their computers -- remains a prime shopping day online. But its novelty has now been partially eclipsed by e-commerce promotions earlier in the season, including on Thanksgiving itself.

Retailers from BestBuy.com to Walmart.com and Staples.com have even opted to offer Cyber Monday deals one day early, on newly coined "Cyber Sunday."

The key is versatility, online experts say, as well as making sure shoppers heading to the Web always find something to inspire them to click on a sale.

John Thompson, senior vice president and general manager of BestBuy.com, said Cyber Monday remains a "really viable marketing concept," but smart retailers must offer choice.

"There's demand out there, but you have consumers spending their time differently," he said. "If you don't have one group that shops early, you'll have those who say 'I'll enjoy my Thanksgiving and those same deals or as-good deals will be there Cyber Monday.'"

Marketing firms say tactics have changed in luring consumers to buy online. Whereas in prior years a full email inbox of online deals awaited those back at work on Monday, the offers now increasingly come on Black Friday if not before.

Disneystore.com, for one, had a "record sales day" on Thanksgiving, according to Jim Fielding, president of Disney Stores.

U.S. online sales were up 33 percent on Thanksgiving this year, according to web analytics firm IBM Coremetrics.

Just as many promotions are sent via email on Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving, as on Cyber Monday, according to Responsys. And half of retailers planned to send email on Cyber Sunday as well as on Thanksgiving, the interactive marketing firm found.

PayPal, the online payments unit of eBay, said its first holiday spike in payment volume came on November 15. On Black Friday, total payment volume, or the total value of goods sold, rose 27 percent versus last year.

Online deals will continue throughout the holiday season. Amazon.com, the largest online retailer, said its Black Friday deals would last all week, while Target.com and eBay have set up daily deals through December.

BEST DEAL?

Despite the e-commerce selling season that now extends before and after Cyber Monday, the Monday after Thanksgiving is still a prime focus of retailers.

Nine out of ten retailers planned to offer a promotion for Cyber Monday, Shop.org and BIGresearch found in a survey. That was more than the nearly three-quarters of respondents in 2007.

Fears that Europe's debt crisis could spiral out of control have pushed stocks off two-year highs hit earlier this month. Since November 5, the S&P has fallen 3.1 percent after running up 17 percent over the two months before that. At Friday's close, the S&P 500 was down 0.9 percent for the week, almost matching the Dow's 1 percent drop.

However, those fears have been countered by signs of a gathering recovery in the labor market at home. The government's nonfarm payrolls report on Friday is set to be another sign of a turnaround in hiring that could boost stocks through the end of the year.

Anecdotal evidence suggests holiday shopping got off to a good start. The S&P retail index .RLX rose more than 5 percent in the run up to "Black Friday," the day after Thanksgiving, when Americans traditionally take shopping malls by storm.

Retail stocks' gains are a sign of an increasingly bullish view of the U.S. consumer after a string of stronger indicators on jobs, sentiment and spending.

"The consumer is more confident and they are spending a bit more money, and I think retail as a whole is perking up," said Gary Bradshaw, portfolio manager at Hodges Capital Management in Dallas, adding that retail stocks "look relatively cheap to us, and I think sales are going to surprise to the upside."

Friday's payrolls report is expected to show the economy added 140,000 jobs in November, according to economists polled by Reuters. If that forecast is met, the jobs data will fit a pattern of growing strength in the labor market.

In October, companies hired at their fastest pace since April, the government's payrolls data showed, while the latest weekly initial claims for unemployment benefits have dropped to their lowest in over two years. November consumer sentiment rose to the highest level since June. October consumer spending also gained.

BLACK FRIDAY ANYTHING BUT BASIC

Early anecdotal evidence from Black Friday suggested shoppers were spending and that discounts were not as deep this year as last, potentially helping to lift retailers' margins as they look for the best holiday season in three years.

Black Friday marks the start of the holiday spending when U.S. retailers traditionally turn a profit, or go into the black for the year.

The National Retail Federation said that nearly 60 million Americans plan to hit the stores over the weekend, while another 78 million might join the crowds of shoppers. The NRF will provide an update on Sunday.

Retailers on the front lines will publish same-store sales data on Thursday when they will likely comment on the weekend's events.

"It seems the American consumer is back with a vengeance," said Kim Caughey Forrest, senior equity research analyst at Fort Pitt Capital Group in Pittsburgh. "If we are to believe CEOs of retailers, they feel they can support margins with prices that are attracting consumers."

Shares of Amazon.com (AMZN.O), a favorite online retailer, have run up 12 percent since mid-November, and hit an all-time high of $177.25 mid-week.

Tens of thousands of Irish are expected to march in Dublin on Saturday in a union-organized protest against the government's decision to seek aid from the EU and IMF to help it deal with its crumbling banks and gaping budget deficit.

European officials hope the 85 billion euro ($112.7 billion) aid program will help draw a line under the debt crisis which started in Greece and now threatens to engulf countries like Portugal and Spain, the fourth-largest economy in the euro zone.

But market pressures have shown no signs of easing. The euro stumbled to a two-month low against the dollar on Friday and the risk premiums investors demand to buy Irish, Portuguese and Spanish debt instead of German Bunds hovered near record highs.

"The current market environment is so febrile and illiquid that the differences between Portugal and Ireland (or Greece) are quickly overlooked, as markets focus on the possible next stage of contagion," Barclays Capital economist Laurent Fransolet wrote in a research note.

The conditions of Ireland's rescue deal with the European Union and International Monetary Fund are expected to be unveiled on Sunday.

A report late on Friday from state broadcaster RTE said the interest rate on the bailout funds being negotiated with the EU and IMF would be between 6 and 7 percent, at the high end of expectations.

The main opposition party Fine Gael said such a rate would be unacceptably high, potentially creating a new hurdle for the government as it works to complete the rescue and secure passage of its 2011 austerity budget next month with a razor-thin parliamentary majority.

Even before Ireland had begun talks on a rescue, its fragile government led by Prime Minister Brian Cowen had announced plans for a far-reaching four-year austerity program targeting savings of 15 billion euros.

That means significant new cuts mandated by the EU and IMF are unlikely. For now, Ireland appears to have successfully resisted pressure from some euro zone partners for it to raise its ultra-low 12.5 percent corporate tax.

The rescue deal could force senior bondholders in the country's big banks, which face mounting losses due to reckless property lending in the boom years, to shoulder some of the costs of the bailout.

ANGER BUBBLING

The Irish public has stoically borne two years of recession, a relentless surge in unemployment and a program of tax rises and spending cuts, but anger is bubbling over at the new measures and the decision to seek aid -- a move many believe hands over the country's hard-won sovereignty to Brussels.

Unions have called for a march on Saturday to Dublin's General Post Office building, headquarters of a nationalist uprising against British rule in 1916 and a potent symbol of Irish independence.

The biggest demonstration of the crisis so far was in early 2009 and attracted about 100,000 people.

The added shares vaulted GM past Agricultural Bank of China's (601288.SS) $22.1 billion IPO in July and underscored the strong demand for the taxpayer-rescued automaker's stock.

GM said on Friday that underwriters led by Morgan Stanley (MS.N), JPMorgan Chase & Co (JPM.N), Bank of America Merrill Lynch (BAC.N) and Citigroup Inc (C.N), exercised their full option on an additional 71.7 million common shares worth $2.37 billion.

They also exercised an option to purchase 13 million preferred shares for $650 million.

Underwriters had 30 days from the IPO to exercise the options.

GM last week had raised $20.1 billion in an IPO of common and preferred shares in what was the biggest U.S. IPO ever. Without the preferred shares, GM's IPO would have been smaller than China's AgBank.

On November 18, their first day of trading, the shares rose 3.6 percent. They closed on Friday up 33 cents at $33.81, or 2.5 percent above the $33 IPO price.

The U.S. government bailed out GM for $50 billion after the automaker's 2009 bankruptcy.

The IPO caps the first stage of a turnaround that has taken the 102-year-old automaker from near-death to an unlikely Wall Street flotation favorite in 2010.

A successful stock debut may help the Obama administration argue that the controversial taxpayer bailout of GM was worthwhile.

The White House has said U.S. taxpayers are on track to recoup the full investment made by the administration and that it hopes to make substantial progress toward shedding the government's stake entirely by mid-to-late 2012.

The strong response to the stock sale reflects growing investor confidence that GM is moving beyond its unpopular, taxpayer-funded bankruptcy with sharply lower costs and higher profit potential.

The U.S. Treasury remain GM's largest shareholder after the IPO with a third of the shares outstanding.

Barclays Capital, Deutsche Bank, Goldman Sachs, Credit Suisse and Royal Bank of Canada are GM's other major underwriters. Lazard and Boston Consulting Group served as advisers to the Treasury. Evercore Partners advised GM.

In the days before the IPO, the price range and the number of shares, including preferred, were all increased.

GM last week sold 478 million common shares at $33 each, raising $15.77 billion, as well as $4.35 billion in preferred shares, more than the initially planned $4 billion.

(Reporting by Clare Baldwin and Jonathan Spicer; editing by Carol Bishopric and Tim Dobbyn)

"The deadline for year-end redemptions has elapsed and we have received approximately $3 billion in total redemption requests," FrontPoint co-chief executive officers Dan Waters and Mike Kelly said in a letter sent to investors on Friday.

Reuters obtained a copy of the letter.

A spokesman for FrontPoint declined to comment.

About half of the redemption requests were related to FrontPoint's healthcare portfolios, which executives decided to liquidate. The portfolios were allegedly at the heart of one of the government's probes, people familiar with the matter said.

Investors in those portfolios have already received their money back, the FrontPoint executives said in their letter.

Investor redemptions at other FrontPoint strategies, however, underscore just how nervous pension funds, endowments and wealthy individuals have become about the whiff of trouble. This week the probe picked up speed when federal agents raided three hedge funds, sent subpoenas to other fund managers, and arrested one executive at a so-called expert network company.

FrontPoint, which offers more than a dozen portfolios to investors, expects to start 2011 with roughly $5 billion in assets, down from $11 billion before the financial crisis, the letter said.

FrontPoint's biggest star is Steve Eisman, who made millions by anticipating the housing market collapse long before anyone else did. Eisman became something of a celebrity in the $1.7 trillion hedge fund world after he was featured prominently in journalist Michael Lewis' best-selling book "The Big Short," which chronicles how a savvy group of traders capitalized on the crisis.

Greenwich, Connecticut-based FrontPoint was acquired by investment bank Morgan Stanley in 2006 and is now being spun off. Morgan Stanley spokeswoman Erica Platt declined to comment on the redemptions.

But she said "We remain focused on assessing the impact of the last weeks' events and continue to work toward the restructuring of our ownership of FrontPoint."

Earlier this month, federal authorities arrested Yves Benhamou after charging that he had illegally passed on inside information to a hedge fund manager about Human Genome Sciences Inc in 2008.

Benhamou, a French doctor, was overseeing a clinical trial for the biotechnology company and was also consulting with hedge fund managers who specialized in selecting healthcare stocks.

While neither the hedge fund nor the manager was named in the government's case, people familiar with the matter said it was FrontPoint and Joseph "Chip" Skowron, a co-portfolio manager at its healthcare funds. FrontPoint put Skowron, who earned his medical degree at Yale, on leave the same day the government announced its charges against Benhamou.

The arrest of Benhamou and Don Ching Trang Chu, a former executive at an expert-network firm, suggest that the government is probing exactly how hedge funds interact with these types of industry consultants.

(Additional reporting by Elinor Comlay in New York, editing by Matthew Lewis)