Crypto News: Why your candy might have less chocolate this Halloween

It's Halloween, and as the spooky season wraps up, Emma Sanchez stops by to take a look at the candy market. Plus: A deep look into an unusual hacker's crimes. If this email was forwarded to you, click here to sign up.

Dentists rejoice: Trick-or-treat hauls might be slightly smaller this year. Thankfully, it's unlikely young superheroes and princesses will notice.

A September report from the National Retail Federation sees Halloween spending down this year, but it's hardly a bloodbath, with sales expected to fall to $11.6 billion this year from a peak of $12.2 billion in 2023.

"It really translates to just about $4 or $5 less per person in terms of spending when we compare it to last year," says Katherine Cullen, vice president of industry and consumer insights at the NRF. "That could be someone deciding to buy one less bag of candy or reusing a costume from last year, making some of those small decisions."

Halloween candy at a Walgreens in Queens, New York. Photographer: UCG/Universal Images Group Editorial

One of those decisions might be stocking up on lollipops or sour candies instead of chocolates, wrote Bloomberg Intelligence analyst Diana Rosero-Peña. Non-chocolate candies are doing particularly well this year and could gain as much as the mid-teens in sales growth, she wrote.

One chain that's gone viral for its gummy candies, BonBon, has seen a pickup in sales in the fourth quarter, which includes the runup to Halloween, a representative told Bloomberg. The Swedish candy company has launched some seasonal mixes and an exclusive TikTok candy mix to capitalize on its social media fame.

Chocolatiers are grappling with the worst cocoa deficit forecast in the past 40 years, hindering profit growth. One way they've reacted is by reducing the amount of chocolate in a candy, introducing varieties with cheaper caramel or nuts.

Rosero-Peña disagrees with the NRF's forecast when it comes to candy makers' revenue, predicting that price increases by Halloween titans, including Hershey, Mars, Lindt and Ferrero, could boost candy sales by as much as 14%.

That's something to chew on while the ghouls and goblins are out and about this evening.

REQUIRED HALLOWEEN READING: A sign at the Haribo Group plant in Pleasant Prairie, Wisconsin, reads: "Our world is the world of gummi candies. We do not let ourselves become distracted from that." Writer Deena Shanker and photographer Adam Golfer take us on a tour as a series of machines assisted by humans make tray after tray of perfectly shaped gummi bears in the flavored colors of raspberry red, lemon yellow, orange orange, pineapple white and strawberry green. (Yes, you read that last one right.): Where Gummi Bears Come From

FOR SPOOKY HOLIDAY VIEWING: In the past decade, horror movies have captured a growing share of the North American box office and now regularly account for about $1 billion worth of annual ticket sales, or 10% of moviegoing in the US and Canada. It's not just audiences that are entranced: Why Hollywood Loves Horror Movies, in Four Charts

HOW 'SKELLY' CAME TO DOMINATE: When Home Depot set out to disrupt the Halloween decor market, it started thinking big. Really, really big: Home Depot's 12-Foot Skeletons Spawned an Industry of Giant Halloween Decor

Pepijn Van der Stap stayed up through the night of Jan. 22, 2023, repairing one of his computers in silence save for the whirring of its fan. About an hour before sunrise, he logged in to his account on a cybercrime website. When he did so, a dozen police officers burst into his apartment—a beachfront spot in the Dutch coastal town of Zandvoort—their faces hidden behind black balaclavas. Within minutes, they'd surrounded Van der Stap, blindfolded him and commandeered his keyboard.

It was a surprising show of force to capture the slim, 5-foot-8 man with dark blond hair and a baby face. Just 20 years old at the time of his arrest, he was well-known among cybersecurity experts in the Netherlands. But not as a criminal—as one of their own. Van der Stap's work identifying security vulnerabilities in commonly used software had helped protect government agencies and thousands of companies internationally from potential data breaches. He'd presented his work at cybersecurity conferences, and his colleagues lauded him for his brilliance.

As those colleagues were about to learn, Van der Stap had also been the subject of a two-year police investigation. For months officers had been listening in on him in his apartment and monitoring his online activity through devices they'd surreptitiously installed on his computer. Van der Stap hadn't broken bad so much as he'd reverted to form, failing in his attempt to leave the hacking underworld behind. His cybersecurity career had been inspired in part by a desire to manage his compulsions, which had begun in his teens and turned him into one of Europe's most prolific hoarders of stolen data.

According to prosecutors, Van der Stap had obtained databases containing stolen information from thousands of companies, meticulously organizing and categorizing them on encrypted hard drives and servers he controlled. Either through his own hacking or by swapping data with other hackers, he'd accumulated personal information on hundreds of millions of people, likely including records on almost every Dutch citizen. His prosecutors say crimes on such a scale "have never occurred before in a Dutch criminal case."

But why? Ryan Gallagher explores the complicated life of this gifted young expert, who was also committing crimes: My Habit Was Collecting

Kamala Harris is distancing herself from Biden's controversial "garbage" comments.
Microsoft shares dropped after the company reported a disappointing cloud growth forecast.
Amazon is eager to take on ChatGPT, but technical challenges have forced the company to repeatedly postpone the updated Alexa's debut.

7-6

That was the score at the end of Wednesday's World Series Game 5. The Dodgers won in the eighth inning, erasing a five-run, fifth-inning deficit during one of the most memorable midgame meltdowns in baseball history.

"The American exceptionalism narrative could end if traders lose faith in US institutions. The way that could happen in the next few weeks is if we have an election without a definitive result for several weeks, and where people can't trust the institutions to adjudicate any of these disputes."

Thierry Wizman

Global currency and rates strategist at Macquarie

The scenario of another contested presidential race riven by violence looms as an unpriced risk for investors who have long counted on US institutional integrity.

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