The maths is simple: a 1% fee on £50,000 is £500 a year. A 1% fee on £5 million is £50,000 a year. The wealthier you are, the more attractive you become to anyone selling something — and the more effort goes into making the pitch land. This isn't a reason to be paranoid about every adviser or opportunity that comes your way, but it is a reason to understand that the volume and sophistication of the pitches aimed at you rises with your net worth, not away from it.

A lot of the worst financial products are sold using a single word: exclusive. "This isn't for everyone”. "You have to be a sophisticated investor to access this”. "We only offer this to a select group of clients”. The pitch isn't really about the investment — it's about making you feel like part of an in-group smart enough to see what others can't. That feeling is doing a lot of work to stop you asking the boring, ordinary questions you'd ask about any other purchase: what does this cost, how does it actually work, and what happens if it goes wrong.

Complexity plays a similar trick. A product wrapped in enough jargon, structuring, and fine print becomes very hard to compare against anything else — which is often the point. If you can't easily work out the fees, that's not a sign you've found something sophisticated. It's usually a sign the fees are worse than something simple would be, and someone would rather you didn't notice. Never be afraid to the “Stupid Questions”, if you don’t fully understand what’s being recommended then this a massive problem.

Some of the most damaging schemes spread through networks of people who trust each other for reasons that have nothing to do with financial expertise — the same golf club, the same church, the same professional circle, the same alumni association. The pitch arrives via someone you already trust, which quietly switches off the scepticism you'd apply to a stranger. Wealthier communities are, if anything, more tightly networked in this way, which makes this kind of trust-based pitch more common at higher levels of wealth, not less.

None of this means wealthy people are less intelligent or more gullible. If anything, the opposite dynamic is often at play: success in a career or a business can create a quiet overconfidence that good judgement in one area transfers automatically to investing. It often doesn't. Being excellent at running a company, practising law, or building a business says very little about whether a particular structured note or private placement is fairly priced.

The genuinely inconvenient truth is that the research on this is remarkably consistent: simple, low-cost, diversified investing beats most complicated or exclusive alternatives once fees and risk are accounted for. The boring approach usually wins, and the more a pitch works to convince you that boring won't be enough for someone like you, the more sceptical you should probably be.

Before committing to anything unusual, it's worth asking plainly how the product or person is paid, whether they'd put their own money into it on the same terms, and what it looks like in writing rather than in conversation. Getting an independent second opinion from someone with no stake in the outcome costs little and catches a surprising amount. Urgency and exclusivity are themselves signals worth noticing — good investments rarely need to be decided on this week.