It was like a chainsaw massacre and the culprit was the man who calls himself The Wood Tycoon.

Paul Smith, 39-year-old wood merchant arrived from nowhere to slice up everyone in his path all the way to the top of Supershare, the Evening Press' month-long investment competition.

The issue now, with all the pre-Budget hype likely to cause grand-scale spasms of buying and selling, is: will he still be able to hack it, or even slice it, by tomorrow (Tuesday)?

Paul, whose family business is York Sawmill in Acaster Malbis, has already proved that he can see the wood for the trees when it comes to the real stock market.

In a year he has netted around £8,000 by studying the form.

But receiving the £50 daily prize for beating 12,500 entries - by now approaching 15,000 - from Supershare sponsors Walsh Lucas, the independent financial advisers of Micklegate, York, surpassed any of those successes for sheer joy.

After all, he had driven his wife, Jane, to distraction as he absorbed almost all his spare moments at their home in Cawood Road, Stillingfleet, watching the mid-results on Teletext, scribbling and figuring - and for a while there was zilch to show for it.

Then suddenly, at close of Friday's market, he was there, all a-buzz, at the top and he was elated.

He said: "I can't tell you how much it made my day. Being a daily Supershare winner has given me much more satisfaction than even my winnings on the real stock market. It's not the £50 daily prize or the prospect of winning the £2,000 first prize or £1,000 runner-up pot at the end of March.

"It's that I worked out a formula of picking back marker outsiders for whom the only way was up plus choices after carefully studying the form. It was more judgement than luck, a real strategy, and after I failed to appear in the top 100 I was disheartened. Now I've proved a point to myself and all those thousands of people!

"And if I did it once, then I can do it again. So I went out this weekend and bought more Saturday copies of the Evening Press and posted them chop-chop so to speak."

Paul's winning portfolio was Safeway (£1,000), National Grid (£500), WH Smith (£3,500) and Spring Ram (£5,000) and he succeeded in turning his original fantasy-money stake of £10,000 into £11,289.78.

Mind you knocking on wood a mere £11.32 short of his total was runner-up Sue Helliwell of The Hobbitts, Husthwaite, a fund raising manager for the Red Cross, who has earmarked a daily £50 prize, should she win it, for her charity.

And third is Sonja Fenning, of Badger Hill. Wasn't she the overall winner two Supershares ago? She was. And didn't she and her husband buy more than 60 Evening Press to fill out the forms? They were, they did and they have again.

But on Friday night there was a rush of new names into our Top 100 as the Stock Market swung 40 points both ways with punters profit taking through pre-Budget jitters on the one hand and riding the updraughts on the other.

Could there be a total clearout in the Supershares Top 100 tomorrow?

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