rallied

Shares of MP Materials (MP 8.69%) rallied on Friday, up 13% as of 12:53 p.m. ET.

MP Materials has become a highly strategic company in the U.S., especially after July, when the U.S. Department of Defense directly invested $400 million in the rare-earth elements miner, while also committing to purchasing future output at certain price floors.

Rare-earth elements are critical materials used in a variety of industrial and military electronics applications, so MP Materials has since moved higher whenever geopolitical tensions rise and the subject of critical materials comes to the forefront.

That’s what happened today.

Image source: Getty Images.

Trump threatens China over new rare-earth elements restrictions

On Friday, President Trump took to his social media platform, Truth Social, to excoriate China. President Trump threatened to greatly increase the already-substantial tariffs on Chinese imports into the U.S., and even threatened to cancel his upcoming meeting with President Xi Jinping.

The bellicose reaction came as a response to China apparently instituting new export controls on rare-earth elements yesterday. On Thursday, the Chinese Ministry of Commerce said foreign countries must obtain a license to export rare-earth products sourced from China. Of note, China controls roughly 70% of global rare-earth products, especially on the refining side, so this move threatened to cut off or slow these supplies to the rest of the world.

The new tensions were a disappointing step backward from the ongoing trade talks that investors hoped were improving since April’s “Liberation Day” salvo.

Still, certain stocks benefit from geopolitical tensions, and MP Materials — along with other miners of critical minerals — rallied today in response to the back and forth. If rare-earth element imports are delayed or cut off, MP Materials’ U.S.-based rare-earth mining operations would only see that much more demand.

Plays on geopolitical tensions have rallied this year

Strategic U.S. assets, whether in rare-earth elements, uranium, semiconductors, or others, as well as the price of gold, have risen this year. This has been due to the increasingly protectionist stance of the U.S. government, and the increasing inflationary pressure resulting from U.S. attempts to wean itself off cheaper foreign materials and goods to become more self-sufficient.

These trends don’t appear to be slowing down any time soon, so while many of these stocks are up a lot and trade at very high valuations, it may be prudent for investors to secure some “strategic” U.S. companies as part of their diversified portfolios today.

Shares of EchoStar (SATS -2.14%) rallied another 23.6% in September, according to data from S&P Global Market Intelligence.

EchoStar’s rally was all the more notable, given that EchoStar had already rallied nearly 90% in the prior month, when it managed to sell a big slug of its wireless spectrum at prices much higher than the market had anticipated.

September saw a repeat occurrence, with EchoStar selling even more of its wireless spectrum assets, bringing in even more cash, as well as shares of Elon Musk’s SpaceX. Management also gave a presentation regarding what it has done with all the cash, as well as its operational plan going forward.

EchoStar unloads more spectrum to SpaceX, with even more to go

Early in September, EchoStar announced it had agreed to sell another $17 billion worth of wireless spectrum to Elon Musk’s SpaceX. That deal followed EchoStar’s blockbuster $23 billion sale of wireless spectrum to AT&T (T 1.02%) in August.

Unlike the all-cash AT&T sale, the SpaceX sale was split between $8.5 billion in cash and $8.5 billion in SpaceX stock. The AT&T sale had essentially been enough to wipe out all of EchoStar’s debt, so a cash infusion wasn’t necessarily needed.

Meanwhile, EchoStar is now a SpaceX shareholder, which, though private, appears to be an exciting growth company that should serve the space economy for decades to come. That may be a refreshing “upside” play for EchoStar shareholders, whose main other businesses are the declining DISH TV satellite TV and broadband, as well as the low-growth Boost Mobile wireless service.

In a mid-month presentation, EchoStar management said that it will immediately pay down $11.4 billion in debt right away, taking out its highest-yielding notes that go up to an 11.75% yield. That should greatly lower the company’s interest expense, while leaving EchoStar with $24.1 billion in cash against just $13.4 billion in debt after the debt paydown. In addition, EchoStar will have its $8.5 billion stake in SpaceX also on the balance sheet.

EchoStar also still had about 45 MHz of spectrum remaining at the end of the month, down from the 140 MHz or so before the AT&T deal. On the last day of September, Bloomberg reported Verizon (VZ -0.01%) was interested in the remaining spectrum still held by EchoStar. That caused another jump in the stock, capping another great month for shareholders.

Image source: Getty Images.

Could EchoStar still be cheap?

EchoStar’s market cap has risen to about $21.6 billion. While that is a lot higher than early in the year, EchoStar now has $10.7 billion in net cash, along with $8.5 billion in SpaceX shares, and some extra spectrum of unknown market value.

That means the remaining “legacy” businesses are only valued at $2.4 billion — even valuing the remaining spectrum at zero. And while the remaining businesses technically are “losing” money, they have made $15.5 billion in revenue over the past 12 months. Meanwhile, the retirement of EchoStar’s debt should relieve lots of interest expense and could also enable lower capital spending.

EchoStar chairman and co-founder Charlie Ergen is a savvy operator, as evidenced by his purchase of wireless spectrum that later turned out to be very valuable. It wouldn’t be crazy to assume that he and his team will create more value going forward with the greater financial flexibility they have to work with today.

Shares of database and cloud giant Oracle (ORCL -0.47%) rallied 24.4% in September, according to data from S&P Global Market Intelligence.

Oracle named two new co-CEOs to succeed current CEO Safra Katz, and the Donald Trump Administration also gave its approval to the general terms for Oracle to acquire part of TikTok U.S., and to also manage the app.

Normally, those would have been fairly consequential events, but they weren’t really the reason for Oracle’s September rise. While the CEO change was significant, Chairman Larry Ellison is still heavily involved in Oracle’s operations and strategy.

Rather, the main event was Oracle’s second quarter earnings call Sept. 9, when the company disclosed an absolutely massive increase in its cloud unit’s remaining performance obligations (RPO). That sent Oracle’s stock up nearly 40% the following day — an astonishing rally for a company of that size — before the stock settled back into a 24.4% gain.

Image source: Getty Images.

Oracle’s RPO goes parabolic

Interestingly, when Oracle reported first fiscal quarter earnings, it missed expectations on both the top and bottom lines, with revenue growing a solid-but-not-spectacular 12.3%.

But of course, it wasn’t the prior quarter but rather the future that got investors incredibly excited. To that end, Oracle recorded a massive 359% increase in its cloud unit’s remaining performance obligations (RPO), which is contracted capacity to be used in future years.

It was subsequently reported the massive growth was due to OpenAI, which signed a $300 billion agreement to rent AI compute capacity from Oracle for five years starting in 2027.

OpenAI is the creator of ChatGPT, the first mover in AI large language models. So while the massive increase in Oracle’s RPO was great to see, some might have been skeptical about where the money-losing OpenAI would find all the cash needed to fulfill the contract.

The question was partially answered later in the month, when Nvidia (NVDA 1.25%) and OpenAI agreed to a long-term funding agreement. Under that agreement, Nvidia will invest up to $100 billion in OpenAI in order to fund 10 gigawatts of data centers, with the first tranche set to come online in late 2026.

So, it appears that Nvidia will help OpenAI pay for its massive new cloud contract with Oracle, which likely alleviated at least some of the potential funding concerns for Oracle’s RPO.

Can the Oracle-OpenAI-Nvidia trio take on the rest of the Magnificent Seven?

The artificial intelligence wars are heating up, with the major cloud computing companies in the Magnificent Seven spending tens of billions or even $100 billion-plus this year to win the AI race, and perhaps even achieve artificial general intelligence.

Coming into the month, Oracle was an AI player, though not one of the biggest as a distant fourth-place cloud provider. OpenAI, the first mover in LLMs, is still a startup, growing fast but still losing billions every year. And while Nvidia dominates in AI GPUs today, all the big clouds are also developing their own custom AI chips.

So these three players, which all have strengths but lack the all-in-one breadth of the leading cloud infrastructure players, appeared to team up in September. It will be very interesting to see if the three-way alliance can outpace the rest of the cloud giants in the AI races, which should get very interesting through the rest of this decade.

Shares of Alibaba (BABA 4.26%) are rallying again today, up as much as 5.5% before settling into a 4.4% gain as of 12:34 p.m. ET.

Alibaba held a big cloud event last week, giving a bullish outlook and raising its cloud spending forecast above its prior target of $53 billion over three years. Apparently, the outlook was encouraging enough for several Wall Street analysts to significantly raise their price targets on shares to start the week.

Morgan Stanley and Jefferies up their BABA targets

On Monday, analysts at Wall Street banks Morgan Stanley and Jefferies raised their price targets on Alibaba. Morgan Stanley’s Alibaba analyst team raised its target from $165 to $200, largely on the back of increased cloud computing growth. The analysts now actually see cloud growth accelerating 32% in fiscal 2026 and 40% in 2027. For reference, last quarter Alibaba grew its cloud revenue 26%, which was already an accelerating figure.

Obviously, generative AI is sparking huge new demand for Alibaba’s cloud services and models, with the Morgan Stanley analysts projecting the number of tokens doubling every two to three months. An AI token is a word or part of a word in an AI prompt or response that acts as essentially a “unit” of AI processing.

Meanwhile, investment bank Jefferies raised its price target from $178 to $230. The analysts cited “remarkable” progress on Alibaba building out AI infrastructure, innovating with its Qwen series of models, and developing useful software agents.

Image source: Getty Images.

Alibaba is still cheaper than the “Magnificent Seven”

Alibaba’s stock has rallied 113% this year in a remarkable AI-fueled turnaround. However, shares only trade at 20.7 times earnings, which is still cheaper than the large U.S.-based tech giants.

There are certainly risks to investing in China; however, it appears the government is now more supportive of the tech sector than the hostile posture it took back in 2021-2022. As such, it’s no surprise to see the country’s tech leaders doing much better today.

Shares of APA (APA 3.02%) rallied 4.1% on Wednesday as of 1:30 p.m. ET, continuing a second straight day of gains for oil stocks.

As was the case yesterday, oil prices leapt higher, albeit off of a low price, as tensions between NATO countries and Russia ratcheted up once again. But this time, the source of increased tensions came from President Donald Trump, in an unexpected reversal from his prior conciliatory tone toward Russia.

Trump gives his blessing to NATO strikes and Ukraine retaking territory

Yesterday, President Trump wrote on Truth Social that:

After getting to know and fully understand the Ukraine/Russia Military and Economic situation and, after seeing the Economic trouble it is causing Russia, I think Ukraine, with the support of the European Union, is in a position to fight and WIN all of Ukraine back in its original form.

The comments reveal a significant about-face for the president, who seemed to be more sympathetic to Russia than Ukraine at the beginning of his term. But it now seems the president is taking an adversarial tone with Russia, which could have implications for oil markets.

In a separate Truth Social post, Trump also advocated for Europe to cease all energy purchases from Russia, noting:

In the event that Russia is not ready to make a deal to end the war, then the United States is fully prepared to impose a very strong round of powerful tariffs… But for those tariffs to be effective, European nations would have to join us in adopting the exact same measures… they have to immediately cease ALL energy purchases from Russia.

Tariffs or sanctions on Russian oil or countries that buy Russian oil could have the effect of lowering supply, which could shoot prices higher, given that Russia accounts for about 10% of all global oil supply. Russia also sells lots of natural gas to Europe, so curtailing that could also boost international natural gas prices as well.

APA is a large upstream oil and gas company with operations outside of Russia, in the U.S., South America, the U.K., and Egypt. So, its production stands to benefit from higher prices if Russia supply is curtailed, either by sanctions or due to Ukraine’s new attacks on Russia storage depots.

Image source: Getty Images.

Think of traditional energy as a dividend-paying hedge

Oil price shocks usually come from geopolitical conflicts, which have the potential to harm the economy — and many of your stocks along with it. However, traditional energy stocks in oil and natural gas can benefit from those shocks, as we saw in 2022. Therefore, APA and its peers can act as a hedge against geopolitical conflict, while the stock also pays out a 4.2% dividend yield in the meantime.

Shares of UiPath (PATH 10.83%) rallied on Monday, with shares up 10.5% as of 3 p.m. ET.

UiPAth received a positive sell-side analyst note today, and was discussed extensively on Reddit message board Wall Street Bets (WSB) over the weekend. The combination sent UiPath shares rising, given that shares still trade some 85% below their 2021 all-time high.

Truist gives a thumbs-up, but WSB takes it from there

On Monday, Truist Financial analyst Terry Tillman wrote a note saying he came away “increasingly confident” in UiPath being able to meet or exceed its full-year outlook given on its recent earnings release, following a meeting last week with the company’s CFO, chief operating officer, and investor relations team. That being said, Tillman didn’t change his price target on the stock, leaving it at $12 per share and giving UiPath a hold rating.

While the commentary on full-year guidance is nice, the note by itself probably wasn’t enough to get the stock moving as much as it did today. Likely, the extra boost was provided by meme stock traders on the Reddit message board Wall Street Bets. Mentions of UiPath have increased recently, with one WSB monitor citing a 500% increase in mentions for the stock over the weekend. That likely came when one popular WSB Redditor posted Friday that his next big stock bet is UiPath. If other message board traders follow this poster’s bet, that could be spurring buying and short covering action on Monday.

Image source: Getty Images.

Do your own due diligence

UiPath is still down hugely from its 2021 highs, so if it can harness the power of AI to boost its automation software, the stock could stage a comeback. However, AI also has the potential to raise competition for UiPath, given that a number of AI companies, from the “Magnificent Seven” to OpenAI, are all looking to serve enterprises with AI automation tools.

That being said, that competitive threat has made UiPath trade rather cheaply for a software company, at just 4.3 times sales and 18 times next year’s adjusted earnings estimates.

Shares of hard disk drive manufacturer Seagate Technology (STX 2.12%) rallied this week, up 11.8% this week through 1:54 p.m. ET Friday, according to data from S&P Global Market Intelligence.

Seagate had a relatively quiet week in terms of company-specific news; however, positive data around demand for storage at the edge due to a spike in artificial intelligence (AI) inferencing has led to several analyst upgrades this week.

Seagate gets massive upgrades

Artificial intelligence and semiconductor-related stocks were already on the rise this week, following the last week’s blockbuster AI guidance from Oracle, along with the Federal Reserve’s interest rate cut this week — the Fed’s first cut since last year.

Lower interest rates generally mean lower costs of capital, and large tech stocks are spending boatloads of cash on AI infrastructure this year. So lower interest rates bring the prospects of only fueling that spending even more.

Meanwhile, the composition of that infrastructure is changing, moving from training generative AI models to inferencing, which is the use of those models in everyday tasks.

Inferencing is leading to a new wave of investment in edge storage, where Seagate’s HAMR technology leads the industry in terms of squeezing more TB of data onto each disk. That led to a couple of sell-side analysts upgrading the stock this week.

On Monday, Bank of America upgraded its price target on Seagate from $170 to $215 while reaffirming its “buy” rating, based on a more optimistic outlook for AI spending. Then today, Mizuho analyst Vijay Rakesh increased his target on Seagate by an even greater amount, from $160 all the way to $245. Rakesh’s upgrade follows channel checks indicating strong demand and rising prices for both hard disk drives and NAND flash.

Image source: Getty Images.

But remember: Storage is cyclical

After this week’s surge, Seagate is up a whopping 155.4% year to date, exceeding the gains of many more popular AI leaders.

And while things look rosy today, the memory and storage industry has been quite cyclical in the past, leading to a boom-and-bust dynamic. We’re clearly in a “boom” stage right now, and the length of that stage will be determined by how long the AI infrastructure build-out will take. Many believe it will take several years, but investors should be aware that any macroeconomic hiccups or flagging demand for AI services could lead to severe pullbacks.

Shares of gold miner AngloGold Ashanti (AU 5.02%) rallied 4.4% on Wednesday as of 2:06 p.m. ET. The gold mining stock got a lift as gold prices increased slightly toward the record highs reached briefly yesterday, while a Wall Street sell-side analyst increased his price target by a hefty amount.

Gold rises, and Wall Street boosts Ashanti’s price target

One can think of AngloGold and its mining peers as leveraged plays on the price of gold. Gold, which tends to gain when inflation increases and/or geopolitical tensions rise, has taken off this year for a number of reasons. These include prospects for Federal Reserve interest rate cuts and geopolitical tensions arising after the disruptive tariff war kicked off on April 2, “Liberation Day.”

This week has had no shortage of geopolitical tensions, including Israel’s strike on Hamas leadership in Qatar, as well as the interception of Russian drones over the airspace of Poland — a NATO member. Additionally, this week’s Bureau of Labor Statistics’ downward revision of jobs growth over the 12 months ended in March likely increased the odds of a Federal Reserve rate cut this month, which could be inflationary. Gold hit a record high yesterday before retreating later in the day. However, the price of gold was on the move higher again today, albeit slightly.

So, while most gold miners were up today, AngloGold was especially buoyant as it received a price target increase from $56 to $73 from analysts at RBC Capital, relative to the $64.90 price as of this writing.

Image source: Getty Images.

Ashanti is a cash machine amid higher gold prices

As of today, Ashanti now trades at 17 times earnings, which doesn’t appear to be that expensive, despite its massive 179% year-to-date run.

However, investors should be aware that the main determining factor here is the price of gold, which is up 41.5% on the year. Gold mining stocks tend to move in multiples of the price of gold, as their costs are fixed.

So, when the price of gold goes up, pretty much all of that revenue falls to the bottom line. However, the reverse is also true; if the price of gold were to fall, AngloGold’s profits would fall by a greater amount, and its stock price likely would, too.

Shares of Bloom Energy (BE 12.51%) rocketed 18.5% higher on Wednesday as of 12:35 p.m. ET.

There wasn’t any news specifically from Bloom today; however, last night’s bombshell guidance from Oracle (ORCL 33.94%) is likely boosting Bloom by association, given that Bloom inked an important data center partnership with Oracle in July.

Oracle announces AI hypergrowth, and it will need lots of energy

Bloom surged in July after it announced a landmark deal with Oracle on July 24. For reference, Bloom’s energy servers can transform natural gas or hydrogen into electricity without combustion, producing electricity from an abundant source like natural gas in a cleaner way to meet escalating electricity demand.

Bloom had served utilities and other power users in the past, but the July deal with Oracle was the first direct agreement with a cloud hyperscaler.

Therefore, when Oracle provided astonishing backlog growth in its cloud infrastructure (IaaS) business last night, that also improved the outlook for Bloom, which will likely play a role in providing electricity to those data centers. Oracle reported $455 billion in remaining performance obligation in its cloud IaaS business, up an astounding 359%. On the conference call with analysts, CEO Safra Catz noted she expects cloud infrastructure revenue to grow from $18 billion this year to a stunning $144 billion in fiscal 2030 — over just a matter of four years.

Needless to say, that much growth will require Oracle to build a lot more data centers, which will likely be served in part by Bloom’s energy servers.

Image source: Getty Images.

Bloom looks expensive, but AI growth is off the charts

After today’s rally, Bloom trades at 76.5 times next year’s earnings estimates. That’s very expensive for a low-margin hardware business, but Oracle’s multiyear guide appears to have lifted the prospects for Bloom’s growth over the 2027-2030 time frame.

So while Bloom’s valuation makes it risky at these levels, its artificial intelligence (AI)-related growth story keeps getting better.

Shares of American Eagle Outfitters (AEO 0.21%) rallied 19.8% in August, according to data from S&P Global Market Intelligence.

American Eagle capitalized on July’s optimism regarding its new ad campaign starring actress Sydney Sweeney when President Trump endorsed the company’s campaign in early August. Then later in the month, American Eagle announced a collaboration with Kansas City Chiefs tight end and Taylor Swift fiancée Travis Kelce.

American Eagle’s investment in celebrity pays off

American Eagle’s stock got a bump in late July when it launched a controversial ad with actress Sydney Sweeney with the byline, “Sydney Sweeney has Great Genes Jeans.” While the stock then faded after an initial lift, President Trump weighed in in early August, writing on his social media platform Truth Social that the ad was, “the HOTTEST out there…the jeans are flying off the shelves.”

In response, investors bid up the stock, thinking the controversy might boost publicity for the brand and therefore subsequent sales.

Then later in the month, American Eagle announced a limited addition collaboration with Travis Kelce’s “Tru Colors” clothing line, which Kelce began in 2019. The new limited edition collection is to be unveiled in two “drops,” with one on Aug. 27, and another upcoming on Sept. 24. As luck would have it, the collaboration announcement came one day after Kelce announced his engagement to music star Taylor Swift.

So, American Eagle nabbed a marketing coup in both late July and into August, grabbing support from the President, as well as arguably two of the biggest celebrities in sports and entertainment.

Image source: Getty Images.

What will it mean for the stock, though?

The high-profile marketing push — both planned and unplanned – appeared to boost American Eagle’s near-term outlook. On Sept. 3, the company reported its second-quarter earnings results for the quarter ending Aug. 2, beating analyst expectations even though sales and comparable-store sales were each down 1%.

However, management said it was seeing “an uptick in customer awareness, engagement and comparable sales,” as a result of the Sweeney and Kelce campaigns, and projected comps to return to positive low single digits in both Q3 and Q4. That improvement would appear to validate the impact of the Sweeney and Kelce campaigns.

That said, despite a near-20% gain in August and a 20%-plus gain in September thus far, American Eagle’s stock is only up about 12.8% on the year and is still actually 2.3% below where it was one year ago. A cautious consumer, high interest rates, and the Trump administration’s tariffs have all acted as headwinds to the clothing retailer, as it has to many retailers.

Shares of Chinese e-commerce and tech giant Alibaba (BABA 12.82%) rallied on Friday, appreciating 13.1% as of 2:28 p.m. ET.

Alibaba reported earnings today, which appeared to encourage investors. While profits actually went down, an acceleration of cloud and artificial intelligence (AI) revenue appear to be the most important data points.

In addition, the Wall Street Journal reported the Chinese tech giant has developed a new AI chip, which could take on importance since China recently issued an order discouraging the use of Nvidia‘s (NVDA -3.38%) H20.

Alibaba is becoming a top Chinese AI company

In its fiscal first quarter, Alibaba grew revenue just 2%, but revenue grew 10% outside of divestitures, which included the Sun Art and Intime businesses. Within that 10%, Alibaba’s domestic e-commerce revenue grew 10%, international e-commerce grew 19%, and the cloud intelligence group accelerated to a 26% growth rate.

On the negative side, profits actually decreased, with adjusted non-GAAP (generally accepted accounting principles) earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization (EBITDA) falling 11%. The company put big investments behind its Taobao Instant Commerce initiative, which aims to deliver packages within an hour, as well as associated marketing efforts. An overwhelming majority of Alibaba’s business is still in a brutally competitive Chinese e-commerce industry, and at least in this quarter, we saw that competition in the form of lower margins.

Yet it appears the cloud revenue acceleration was exciting enough, especially as management noted that AI-related cloud revenue grew at a triple-digit rate for the eighth consecutive quarter.

AI enthusiasm may have also been sparked by today’s Wall Street Journal article highlighting Alibaba’s new chipmaking efforts. Alibaba’s prior efforts in this area had focused on application-specific chips, but the WSJ reported Alibaba’s newest chip can achieve a broader range of AI inference tasks. Also embedded in the WSJ article is the fact that. unlike Huawei’s AI chip, Alibaba’s new chip will be software-compatible with Nvidia’s, so developers won’t have to reprogram their entire stack.

Image source: Getty Images.

Alibaba on the rebound?

Alibaba has rebounded strongly off its lows of late 2022, more than doubling since then, but also sits about 63% below its all-time highs from late 2020. The stock trades for just 18 times earnings, which still seems cheap for a tech giant with an AI growth story.

Of course, most Chinese tech giants trade cheaper than their U.S. peers for geopolitical reasons, and Alibaba also has strong competition on the e-commerce side. Nevertheless, for those seeking some China-specific exposure, Alibaba should be on the list, if not near the top.

Coronation Street’s Craig Tinker actor Colson Smith has shared how his pals and co-stars supported him on his final day on set, and after he found out he was leaving the ITV soap

Some of Colson Smith’s Coronation Street co-stars helped him through his “toughest days” after he learned he’d been axed from the show.

Colson learned from bosses back in October that his character Craig Tinker, who he’d played since he was 11 years old, was being killed off. Craig bowed out in horrific scenes on Wednesday night, 14 years after his debut.

Colson revealed he had a lot of time to process the news, but he found it “tough” seeing the shocked reactions of his colleagues. Then as it came to his final day on the famous set, one co-star and pal in particular shared their disbelief that he was leaving with many of his colleagues stunned by the news he had been written out of the show.

Speaking to The Mirror and other press, actor Colson revealed a number of his colleagues were “emotional” as the time came to say goodbye for good, while they were also on hand to support him through his last day.

From getting to film some of his last scenes with his close friends to one soap icon guiding him through some last-minute nerves, a number of his co-stars were there for him during some crucial moments as Colson prepared to bow out of the show that “had been his life”

READ MORE: Coronation Street Craig’s violent death leaves fans sobbing as Colson Smith breaks silence

Colson’s mum, dad and sister came to watch him film his final scenes, and “a lot” of cast and crew were left crying over his final day. Praising his friends on the show, he told us: “I’ve been extremely lucky that I have had so many people who I trust and can talk to the entire process about from finding out in October that I was leaving, and I was leaving the show, and what was happening all the way through.

“I knew that my toughest day was going to be the night that I found out in Kate’s office at half past seven, and then my next toughest day was going to be the day that I left. So everything in between kind of merged into one, but I kind of set myself up that week.

“So on the Thursday night, I came back to work at about 8pm and it was a really nice evening. It was warm and security knew that I was coming, and I just sat outside the Rovers on the street for probably about an hour, and just sat on the street, kind of soaked it all in.

“It’s just my way of saying goodbye and thank you to Corrie and everything that it had done for me. Colson’s friend and podcast co-host Ben Price had been off the week of his final episodes, but he headed back to Manchester to be there for him, even visiting the studio the night before Colson’s last day.

“I went back into the car park, Ben was just pulling in and I had a Costco cookie in my mouth. He was like, ‘Where have you got them from?’ and they were in my dressing room. So he came up to get a cookie, and then in my dressing room, he’d seen everything that I bought for the Friday.

“I bought everybody a little Lego Craig Tinker. A little Lego police officer with ginger hair, and I just put a sticker on it that said, ‘PC Tinker will always be there when you need him’, like, ‘I’ll miss you all forever’.

“So then me and Ben spent until about 11 o’clock, dishing all these Lego Craig Tinkers out, hammering them to people’s pigeon holes.” Colson felt ready to face his final day, filming scenes with his close friends.

He said: “My final scenes were full of people who I got along with. I had Andy Whyment in, Joe Duttine and David Nielsen, Jacob Roberts in, so there was so much emotion on set. I was sat in the car park at about ten to seven as Andy Whyment pulled in, and I had Macy Gray’s I Try on in the car, and Andy pulled in in tears.

“He parked his car skew-whiff and I was like you can’t leave your car like that. You’re gonna have to re-park. He just got out, and he was like, ‘I’m sorry, my head’s been a mess, like all night, all day.’ I said to them [all] let’s just get on set and let’s do the job.”

But Kirk Sutherland actor Andy’s emotions continued throughout the day, with him telling Colson of his disbelief over his exit. Colson said Andy told him: “No I don’t like it. I can’t believe what’s happening.”

As it came to shooting his final scenes, Colson got some last-minute nerves. But Roy Cropper legend David Neilson was on hand to save the day. Colson explained: “You get all the way up to your last shot, and you know it’s your last shot.

“I’ve seen so many people leave, I’ve seen so many final speeches, I’ve seen it all so many times and the camera was on me and David Neilson behind the counter at Roy’s Rolls. I turned to him and I went, ‘I’m really nervous,’ and I was borderline shaking. I could feel like the atmosphere building and I can feel people coming in.

“David just pulled me in, whispered in my ear and I was like, yeah, yeah. Like, this is it. They called action, Duncan [Foster]called cut. They checked it, and then the next thing I know, people were clapping, and the studio is kind of full. I was like, wow, done.”

Coronation Street airs Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays at 8pm on ITV1 and ITV X. * Follow Mirror Celebs and TV on TikTok , Snapchat , Instagram , Twitter , Facebook , YouTube and Threads .