Race to £10k: We’ve challenged 5 experts to turn £500 into £10k as fast as possible – from betting to stocks, crypto and Vinted. Now we reveal their tricks, who’s haemorrhaging money – and the strategy soaring ahead

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

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

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

Meanwhile Investing Monkey, who is dabbling in the stock market on a random basis, is ahead of This Is Money’s Simon Lambert, who has been strategically placing his investments in the stock market.

While they are technically behind, Jess Morton, who is reselling vintage clothing, and antiques dealer Gordon Kennedy have been setting up for big gains in the next few weeks.

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

Remember, this is not a guide to investing that we expect readers to copy. 

Trying to make quick money is never a smart way to invest. Any profits made will go to charity. Now, let’s catch up with our contestants.

Crypto trader

Will Nutting, NutStuff founder

Total: £555.64 Gain: £55.64

Cryptocurrencies are in the lead – all while the world was supposedly ending in a Trump-induced meltdown.

Markets have been all over the place with the war in the Middle East but my portfolio of cryptocurrencies is up 11.1 per cent – £55.64 in total.

I said I would be investing in Helium, a ‘people-powered network’, where ordinary people contribute wireless coverage. 

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

They can appear complicated to anyone who isn’t tech savvy but they are used by millions of people.

I invested £200 in Helium at £0.92 per token. That is up 3.3 per cent since last Wednesday.

I also put £100 into Grass, another people-powered network where users share their unused internet bandwidth. 

That has soared 47.1 per cent from £0.17 to £0.25. My only investment to fall was Acurast, which uses smartphones as cloud computers. 

The £100 I invested fell 5.3 per cent. Bitcoin has also been on the up. I invested £100 at £49,500 and it’s now up 7.4 per cent at £53,157.

Investing Monkey

Cheap, high-risk stocks

Total: £538.47 Gain: £38.47

Our dabbling ape was at home in the financial jungle this week – getting off to a good start. 

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

The monkey was quickly up £10.37, largely thanks to its £50 in Miami-based biotechnology company Longeveron, which rose 28 per cent in two days. 

Its money continued to grow with a £50 investment in SUNation Energy, a New York-based solar energy firm, up 46 per cent.

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

Shares Investor

Simon Lambert, publisher, This is Money

Total: £482.49 Loss: £17.51

I need my investments to go up quickly. Unfortunately, share prices have been heading in the opposite direction, with the FTSE 100 sinking 4.9 per cent since the race kicked off. Investors are rattled by the conflict with Iran – almost everything has sold off.

In trying to trade shares against this backdrop, I’ve opted to play it safe. I decided to spread my risk, putting no more than £100 into any stock initially – and to make just one trade a day.

I bought £100 of shares in sofa-seller DFS, on the back of good results, and ended the day up £4.51. 

Unfortunately, my DFS trade and £100 put into chemicals firm Synthomer, whose share price had been on the up, went swiftly into reverse. 

I sold Synthomer at a £10 loss and bought a Vanguard S&P ETF to try to profit from a US stock market bounce on Donald Trump announcing a ‘deal’ with Iran.

After all the above, my £500 pot is down £17.51. I blame the markets. The only problem is I’m doing worse than the monkey!

Antiques dealer

Gordon Kennedy, antiques expert

Cash: £125 (£375 worth of antiques)

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

As spring has arrived, people will be looking out to their gardens again. I’ve bought items that will fit in with this theme.

I bought two cast stone garden lions that seem to date back to the late 19th, early 20th century. 

They are a lovely decorative item, in the style of the Canova Lions – a famous pair of Italian sculptures in Rome – and would usually be placed as gatekeepers outside your home. I paid £170 and I hope to sell them for around £240.

I picked up a florist basket with a lovely zinc lining and a double arched handle for £20. It would be used in a florist shop to display bouquets and is a bit of a rare survivor – wicker is quite a soft wood and so gets damaged easily. 

This piece should go for between £40 and £60. Next, I got a Combined Botanical Album and press book.

The book is for botanical studies and is designed to press flowers at the back and then insert them into the pages.

It came with a pith hat, which could have been worn by a botanist while they were collecting samples of plants. The two items cost £40. I hope to sell them together and double my money.

I also got two plant boxes for £65 and they’re probably worth at least £90.

The final item is a Windsor chair – a hooped back chair that is popular around the UK.

This one has a leather seat, which is very unusual. I got it for £80 and I’ll be asking for £180. In a shop you could see it up for £350 but I sell to other dealers. I don’t like to sit on items so my prices need to be competitive.

Fashion reseller

Jess Morton, vintage clothes reseller

Cash: £0 (£500 worth of clothing)

I’ve ordered £500 of clothing to get started. It’s a mix of the Y2K jeans I specialise in, flirty skirts, jeans shorts, ladies’ High Street fashion items from brands such as Zara, M&S and Monsoon and a few men’s hoodies.

I have around 50 items in total. I get my clothes by ordering second-hand vintage clothing from wholesalers who sell in bulk for cheap. 

For my business JessVintageRevivals, I often 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 haul arrived over the weekend and I’ve been sorting through it all, checking for defects. The jeans can sometimes have a broken zip or missing buttons because they’re more than 20 years old, so I got my sewing machine out to fix them up.

In the past I’ve received jeans covered in paint, in which case I often turn them into cut-off shorts or use bleach for a tie dye effect.

I’m selling items for this competition on an unused, anonymous Vinted account. It has no followers and has only sold three items so it’s a real test to show how you can set up at home if you are new to reselling clothing. I’ll be listing the items 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 on week one. Last week I said I would never bet on Tottenham but I got tempted and I did. I should have trusted my gut – I lost. Twice!

First was in a treble bet on Wednesday night, I put £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 wager that combines three separate bets into one, and you have to win all three for the bet to pay out.

I also had a £5 treble bet on Atletico and Tottenham to draw with the scores in the other two games staying at what they were mid-game when I placed the bet. 

Tottenham scored a last-minute winner so I missed out on the £42 I would have won had they drawn.

Over the weekend, my cousin (a Tottenham fan) told me that they had turned a corner and were playing well. He said that I should grow up and bet on Tottenham as they would beat relegation rivals Nottingham Forest.

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

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

Next, I put £10 on a bet called ‘Skybet special even money’, which gives you the chance of making 100 per cent profit (so I would get £20 back for a win). I bet on Arsenal’s Bukayo Saka to have a shot on target in the match against Man City and won.

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

In total, I made 16 bets, spending £100 and lost £39.20.