About 5 per cent of people are sociopaths. They will lie, cheat, stab you in the back, maybe even steal from you and feel no remorse.

In the past year I’ve done due diligence on several hedge funds, deals, companies, etc, and invariably uncovered lying – inflated returns and exaggerated résumés. The chief executive of a company trying to raise money told me he was 46 when in fact he was 66. A head of a micro-cap company checked himself into a mental institution on the day earnings were to be released. It turns out that bond investors had given money directly to the chief executive instead of to the company, as they had thought.