If working with your closest friends is supposed to be a recipe for disaster, TDM Asset Management should have failed from day one.

Nine years from when the fund began taking money from family offices, it’s just one of the so-called ­business rules that partners and best friends Hamish Corlett , Tom Cowan and Ben Gisz like to think they are ­proving wrong. “We weren’t friends ­initially because Tom didn’t let me on the fort," says Corlett, who met Cowan at Sydney’s St Mark’s pre-school.