Race to £10k: We challenged five experts to turn £500 into £10k – from betting to stocks, crypto and Vinted – so who has taken the early lead?

The race begins. Last week we gave £500 to five experts in different fields (and our own Investing Monkey) and challenged them to turn it into £10,000 as quickly as possible.

The Daily Mail and This is Money’s ground-breaking experiment, Race to £10,000, will test how easy it really is to win huge amounts of cash and what the best strategy is.

A strong first week for cryptocurrencies pushed Will Nutting, founder of newsletter NutStuff Investment, into an early lead.

Meanwhile, Investing Monkey, who casually dabbles in the stock market, is ahead of This Is Money’s Simon Lambert, who strategically places his investments in the stock market.

Although technically behind, vintage clothing seller Jess Morton and antiques dealer Gordon Kennedy are poised to make big profits in the next few weeks.

It’s been an unlucky week for sports bettor Kevin Quigley, whose relationship with the Spurs football team has gone from bad to worse.

Remember, this is not an investment guide that we expect readers to copy.

Trying to make quick money is never a smart way to invest. All profits will go to charities. Now let’s get to know our contestants.

crypto trader

Will Nutting, founder of NutStuff

Total: £555.64 To win: £55.64

While the world is thought to end in a Trump-induced crash, cryptocurrencies are leading the way.

With the war in the Middle East the markets were all over the place but my cryptocurrency portfolio was up 11.1 per cent to a total of £55.64.

I said I would invest in Helium, a ‘human-powered network’ where ordinary people contribute to wireless coverage.

Helium is a DePIN or decentralized physical infrastructure network. Instead of giant corporations owning all the infrastructure, thousands of ordinary people collectively build the network and share the rewards.

They may seem complicated to anyone who isn’t tech-savvy, but they’re used by millions of people.

I invested £200 in Helium for £0.92 per coin. This is up 3.3 percent since last Wednesday.

I also invested £100 into Grass, another human-powered network where users share unused internet bandwidth.

This figure increased from £0.17 to £0.25, an increase of 47.1 percent. My only investment that would fall was Acurast, which uses smartphones as cloud computing.

The £100 I deposited fell by 5.3 per cent. Bitcoin is also on the rise. I invested £100 at £49,500 and it is now up 7.4 per cent to £53,157.

Investment Monkey

Cheap, high-risk stocks

Total: £538.47 To win: £38.47

Our amateur monkey was at home in the financial jungle this week and was off to a good start.

Working on a blindfold principle, the Money Mail team used the random number generator website to select ten penny stocks from a list of the 100 most traded companies on Yahoo Finance with shares under $5.

Monkey soared by £10.37, thanks largely to a £50 gain in Miami-based biotech company Longeveron, which rose 28 percent in two days.

His money continued to grow, rising 46 per cent with a £50 investment in SUNation Energy, a New York-based solar energy company.

Its worst investment was in US electric vehicle charging network EVgo, which fell 9.4 percent.

Stock Investor

Simon Lambert, broadcaster, This is Money

Total: £482.49 Loss: £17.51

I want my investments to increase rapidly. Unfortunately, share prices are trending in the opposite direction. FTSE100 It has fallen 4.9 percent since the race began. Investors are nervous about the conflict with Iran; almost everything has been sold.

While trying to trade stocks in this environment, I chose to stay away from risk. I decided to spread my risk, put no more than £100 into any one stock initially and only trade one trade per day.

Following good results I bought £100 worth of shares in sofa retailer DFS and ended the day with a profit of £4.51.

Unfortunately, my DFS trade and the £100 I invested in chemical firm Synthomer, whose share price was rising, quickly reversed.

I sold Synthomer for a £10 loss and bought the Vanguard S&P ETF to profit from the rise in the US stock market as Donald Trump announced a ‘deal’ with Iran.

After all of the above, my £500 pot was down by £17.51. I blame the markets. The only problem is that I’m worse off than a monkey!

antique dealer

Gordon Kennedy, antiques expert

Advance: £125 (antique worth £375)

I’ve been busy buying antiques this week, visiting other dealers, private dealers and collectors in Dumfries and Galloway as well as around Perth in Scotland. I spent £375 and still have £125 cash left to buy more items.

With the arrival of spring, people will start to look after their gardens again. I purchased items to fit this theme.

I purchased two cast stone garden lions from the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

These are a lovely decorative item in the style of the Canova Lions, a famous pair of Italian statues in Rome, and are often placed as guards outside your home. I paid £170 and hope to sell them for around £240.

I picked up a florist basket with a beautiful zinc lining and double arched handle for £20. It is used to display bouquets in a flower shop and is a rare species; Wicker is a fairly soft wood and therefore easily damaged.

This piece should cost between £40 and £60. Then I bought the Combined Botanical Album and the press book.

The book is intended for botanical studies and is designed to be printed with flowers on the back and placed on the pages.

It came with a cap that a botanist could wear while collecting plant specimens. The price of two products is 40 TL. I hope to sell them together and double my money.

I also bought two plant boxes for £65 and they are probably worth at least £90.

The final product is the Windsor chair, a hooped back chair popular in the United Kingdom.

This one has a very unusual leather seat. I bought it for 80 TL, I will ask for 180 TL. You could sell it for up to £350 in a shop but I sell it to other sellers. I don’t like to overemphasize products so my prices need to be competitive.

fashion salesman

Jess Morton, vintage clothing dealer

Advance: £0 (£500 worth of clothes)

To start, I ordered £500 worth of clothes. It’s a mix of Y2K jeans, which I specialize in, sexy skirts, denim shorts, High Street women’s fashion from brands like Zara, M&S and Monsoon, and a few men’s hoodies.

I have around 50 products in total. I buy my clothes by ordering second-hand vintage clothes from wholesalers who sell them in bulk for cheap prices.

For my JessVintageRevivals business, I typically buy 600 pairs of jeans at a time. I also use an app called Fleek, which connects buyers with wholesalers around the world, and the minimum order can be as little as five items.

My big shopping package arrived over the weekend and I was sorting through it all and checking for defects. Jeans can sometimes have a broken zipper or missing buttons because they are over 20 years old, so I took out my sewing machine to fix them.

I’ve bought dyed jeans in the past, in which case I often turn them into cutoff shorts or use bleach for a tie-dye effect.

For this contest I am selling the items on an unused, anonymous Vinted account. He has no followers and has only sold three products; so here’s a real test of how to get set up at home if you’re new to selling clothes. I will list the products in the coming days.

sports bettor

Kevin Quigley, sports content producer

Total: £460.80 Loss: £39.20

I had a rule and I broke it in the first week. Last week I said I would never bet on Tottenham but that tempted me so I did. I should have trusted my instincts; I lost. Twice!

I first placed a three-way bet on Wednesday night, placing £10 on Bayern Munich to beat Atalanta, Liverpool to beat Galatasaray and Atletico Madrid to beat Tottenham.

For anyone new to betting, a treble bet is a single bet that combines three separate bets into one, and you must win all three for the bet to pay out.

I also placed a £5 triple bet on Atletico and Tottenham and the scores of the other two matches remained the same midway through the game I placed the bet.

Tottenham scored a winner in the last minute and I missed out on the £42 I would have won had it been a draw.

At the weekend my cousin (a Tottenham fan) told me that they had turned the corner and were playing well. He said I should go big and bet on Tottenham to beat relegation rivals Nottingham Forest.

I placed a double bet, £5, on Aston Villa to beat West Ham (which they did) and Spurs to beat or draw Forest. Nottingham Forest won 3-0.

All I can say is that I will never bet on Tottenham again.

I then placed £10 on a bet called ‘Skybet special even money’ which gives you a 100 per cent chance of making a profit (so I’ll get £20 back for a win). In the match against Manchester City I bet on Arsenal’s Bukayo Saka to shoot on target and I won.

My best wins were Ipswich v Millwall and Leeds v Brentford plus two draws at 19.4/1 with Fulham to beat Burnley. Frustratingly, this was my smallest bet of £2 but it returned £40.80.

I placed 16 bets in total, spent £100 and lost £39.20.