Vampires, mummies and corpses aren’t the only ones rising from their slumber on Halloween night.

For U.S. retailers, it doesn’t get much bigger than holiday shopping season. With November just right around the corner, one way for traders to gauge retailers’ expectations this holiday season is to look at how many seasonal employees they are hiring to help shoulder the seasonal workload.

Baker Hughes Incorporated BHI 0.26% shares are trading mostly flat on Monday and General Electric Company GE 0.38% shares are up 1.3 percent after the companies officially announced they will be merging their oil & gas business and creating a new oil services giant that will generate roughly $32 billion in annual revenue.

Apple Inc. AAPL 0.59% shares plummeted more than 2.2 percent following the release of the company’s fiscal Q4 earnings last week. Despite an earnings and revenue beat, the market was disappointed by shrinking margins and 30 percent decline in China sales.

ZTO Express Inc. ZTO 0.06% made a disappointing IPO debut on Thursday, falling 15 percent from its IPO price in its first day trading. Nevertheless, the company’s $19.50 IPO price values the Chinese delivery service provider at a staggering $14 billion.

This week, Exxon Mobil Corporation XOM 0.4% reported the discovery of a massive new oilfield in offshore Nigeria that could contain up to one billion barrels of oil. On the surface, the Owowo discovery seems like great news for Exxon and its shareholders, but a number of market analysts have expressed skepticism about the accessibility…