Cyber Monday is hours away although some sales have already begun

By Dian Vujovich

Assuming you’ve not shopped ’till you’ve dropped and still have plenty of disposable plastic cash available, Cyber Monday sales might likely draw you in—particularly the ones that have already begun. As for market bargain hunters, shopping on Wall Street will have  to wait until  Monday morning.

First, the Cyber Monday stuff.

There certainly are, will be and have been no shortage of deep discounts and free shipping opportunities for shoppers of all venues online—provided your computer doesn’t crash. And if it does, no worries. These babies that once cost thousands can now be had for less than the cost of a handsome Coach leather handbag.

Sunday, Staples, for instance, was offering plenty of  Cyber Monday sales opportunities. Laptop computers, for instance, had prices beginning at $420 ($419.99 literally) on some  Asus and Dell  computers, Gateway’s were offered at a penny shy of $350, and Toshiba for 100 bucks more.

After all the who-bought-stuff-where details come out, I’m sure it will be online sales that take the cake. They’ve been on the rise for years and that trend is not likely to end anytime soon. IBM Smarter Commerce, a unit of International Business Machines Corp, has already reported that online sales had increased 17.4 percent on Thanksgiving and 20.7 percent on Black Friday when  compared with 2011 online sales figures.

But if there’s one figure we’re not likely to ever hear about with respect to Cyber Monday shoppers it’s the one that reveals how many hours employees spend at their terminals or on their personal hand-held devises, clicking-up bargains. And that’s probably a very good thing,

As for market deals, decide that computer stocks might be the worth taking a chance on during Cyber Monday’s trading session here’s a for instance of how three well-branded tech stocks closed last week: Dell (DELL) closed Friday at $9.55, Apple (AAPL) at $571.50, Hewlett Packard (HP) at $12.44.

FYI, tech stocks were the S&P500’s biggest industry gainers when the market closed last week. HP and Dell, for instance, enjoyed positive price gains; Research in Motion (RIMM) had its biggest gain in over three years while Fitch downgraded Sony (SNE) debt ratings to junk. Ouch.