By now, around 15,000 entries will have been submitted for the Supershare '98 competition - and counting. That's the equivalent of a small town.

In short, from where I sit at the hub of the organisation of this Evening Press investment competition, with the bowler hat logo, I am up to my neck in the throes of a month-long minor miracle of communication combined with a dash of fun and quite a bit of naughty greed. And it is all hitched to the reality of the stock exchange.

Well, it's irresistible, isn't it? As a reader of the Evening Press you are given £10,000 in fantasy money to invest in four out of 32 carefully chosen quoted companies and if you are lucky, or astute (or both) you can turn your dream lolly into hard cash as your investments rise or fall in the cross currents, eddies and occasional tidal waves of the Stock Exchange.

At stake at the end of the competition is a £2,000 first prize, £1,000 second prize and a daily prize of £50 for the top of the top 100 just to spice the whole thing up.More than halfway through to the end-of-March deadline and I'm growing used to the mechanics of the late night Supershare shift - the complicated computer logistics of every new day's fortunes on the FTSE 100 automatically triggering recalculation of every value in every Supershare portfolio submitted.

But you daren't be blas. One entry wrongly input each afternoon by our special team working at the Micklegate office of competition sponsors Walsh Lucas & Company in York can create a domino effect of cock-ups. So every entry is numbered, checked, re-checked. Besides, the growing army of entrants won't let you flag. There's a whole community out there giggling at the misfortune of the worst portfolio dunces, watching out to see if there is a comeback of the Fenning family (those one-time overall winners who for a time speckled the Top 100 list) plotting the downfall of multiple daily winners with yet more entry forms.

It's become a massive, spontaneous club, its members laughing and wailing, jeering and cheering in thousands of homes in our region, all inextricably linked by mutual ambition to ride the bucking bronco of market forces, a bronco never wilder than in the days leading up to the Budget.

With every twitch of the market some entrant zooms from obscurity into the coveted Top Ten, while triumphant winners are suddenly consigned to nowhere. Entrants phone at odd times during the day to discuss the fortunes of a single company, or to say: "If I should be the winner tomorrow, what time will the photographer arrive?"

And at the centre of it all, I am as exhilarated as they are, because in a totalitarian, faceless world, it's comforting to know that the community is back.

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.