We're seven weeks into the Race to £10,000 and two players are romping ahead.

Their identity comes as no surprise to me. I always suspected the toughest contenders in the challenge to turn £500 into £10,000 in the shortest time possible would be our vintage clothes reseller and our antiques dealer.

And that’s proved to be so. After a slow start as they built up stock, both Jess Morton, our clothing specialist, and Gordon Kennedy, our antiques expert, have left the rest of us for dust.

Jess, who is buying and selling old clothes on marketplace Vinted, is in the lead with a profit of £396, while Gordon, in second place, has racked up £170 with some smart dealing.

It just shows that if you really want to make a chunky profit fast you can’t beat buying and selling good old-fashioned physical goods.

Here, an individual can use their expertise to spot an underpriced item they know can be sold on for a profit. They only need one buyer willing to pay their higher price.

By comparison, it is much harder to buy undervalued shares and sell them for more. 

That’s because the stock market is often referred to as a weighing machine, where hundreds of millions of participants collectively set prices.

Rather than just waiting for one buyer to agree to pay a premium, you must wait for the whole market to catch up. 

Spotting overlooked opportunities is tough when there are so many other investors trying to do the same – even expert fund managers often struggle.

Think about it this way: finding a share that soars 50 per cent in a short time is rare but a mark-up of that amount is common in retail.

Meanwhile, stocks with a chance of rocketing to the moon tend also to risk a sudden tumble to earth.

Trading shares is my role in the Race to £10,000 and, while I know I need to take risks that I would never do with my own money, I also don’t want to crash out of the race early by punting like crazy.

Therefore I’ve been shunning the most volatile stocks and dabbling with momentum trading. 

This involves backing stocks that are rising on the basis they tend to keep going up and you can ride the wave. The idea is to then get out before things go south.

You may not be able to spot the absolute bottom and top, but if you can ride it for a while, bank some gains, and repeat the trick with other stocks, it can pay off.

It sounds simple but in practice is not, as evidenced by my position. Instead of making headway towards £10,000, my portfolio is in reverse and I’m now down £25.

On the plus side, I’m not a million miles behind crypto trader Will Nutting, who is in third place with a total profit of £55. 

He has been buoyed by his £100 investment in Bitcoin, which has risen from £49,500 per coin to £59,834.

And I am at least a long way ahead of our sports bettor, Kevin Quigley, who has had a disastrous run of form that has left him nursing a £277 loss until this week. 

But it seems Kevin’s luck is turning – he says he is ‘finally back in the game’ after winning £187 on 12 bets this past week. That leaves him £90 down overall.

But what’s truly galling is that until this week, I have been losing to our Investing Monkey, who is allocated penny shares picked by the Daily Mail Money team using a random generator. 

Despite erratically speculating on volatile small company shares, the chimp is only down £50 – just behind me.

In my defence, I said at the start that two decades of writing about investing have taught me that trying to make money fast in the stock market is a fool’s errand.

Nonetheless, as I’ve at least put a bit of thought into my shares, it would be nice to be in the black rather than the red. That mindless chimp has become my nemesis.

I’ve been spreading my risk by taking a maximum £100 stake in any one company. This is a double-edged sword, as while it stops one dud blowing up the entire portfolio, it also limits gains.

The stocks I have bought have proved a mixed bag. The top performers are fund manager Aberdeen, up 8.9 per cent, and a US stock market-tracking Vanguard S&P 500 ETF, up 8.23 per cent, but these have only equated to profits of £8.86 and £8.23, respectively.

North Sea oil and gas firm Capricorn Energy was doing well but has since sunk back to the price I bought at. 

The biggest loser has been industrial fastenings maker Trifast, a relative minnow with a total value of £84million compared with Aberdeen’s £3.9billion. 

I picked Trifast after spotting a share bounce and bought £75 worth. It’s now down 11.55 per cent, leaving me an £8.62 loss.

Writing this has reminded me to cut Trifast and move on. It can join Alumasc, DFS Furniture, Staffline and Synthomer on the discarded stocks pile.

In seven weeks, I’ve bought eight stocks and still hold four. This reflects the pressure of the race, a sensible investor wouldn’t chop and change like this in real life as it doesn’t give enough time for stocks to slip but still go on to rise.

But my fitful trading has highlighted a valuable truth about investing. Savers are often reluctant to get their cash to work harder by investing it. Instead they fear it’s akin to gambling and don’t want to lose all their money.

Yet my experience shows that even if you buy individual company shares and things go badly, it’s unlikely you will lose everything. For that to happen, the firm would need to go bust.

Diversify across a number of companies and you substantially reduce the risk.

My ragtag handful of stocks definitely is not a well-diversified portfolio but, after almost two months of rash trading, I’m only down 5 per cent. 

Compare that to our actual gambler, who is down 18 per cent (sorry, Kevin) and there’s a financial lesson to be learnt.