How do you pair an event-style market with a perp without over-hedging?

The first question is not how much perp to add. It is which part of the event contract you are trying to preserve. Usually you want to keep the event-specific repricing while shaving off broad market drift that would otherwise dominate the holding period.

A perp moves linearly with the underlying while an event market often moves in a more threshold-shaped way, especially near expiry or after fresh information. A hedge that looks sensible in one price zone can become too large once event probability changes.

Start with a small hedge designed to remove only the obvious shared beta, then test whether the event leg still responds meaningfully to the catalyst in your scenario map. If the combined position barely changes when the event thesis strengthens, the perp is probably doing too much.

Store the contract metadata, expiry, hedge ratio, and scenario assumptions together so the with-hedge and without-hedge versions can be compared directly. That keeps the structure grounded in workflow evidence instead of in a neat but untested intuition.