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Topic cluster / Signal and portfolio designA market-neutral strategy tries to remove broad market direction so returns come from spread behavior, relative value, or feature selection instead of simply being long or short crypto beta.
What to remember
A market-neutral strategy is built so that broad crypto up or down moves are not supposed to be the main source of PnL. Instead, the goal is to isolate the return from a specific edge, such as a spread closing, a carry differential, or a cross-sectional ranking signal.
In practice that usually means pairing longs and shorts, capping concentration, and checking whether your exposure really is neutral to the market risk you think you removed.
Neutrality is not just about looking sophisticated. It changes what your strategy is allowed to claim. If the edge is real, it should still have something to say when the market itself is noisy or flat.
Neutral does not mean safe. Correlations jump in stress, hedges slip, and baskets that looked balanced in research can become lopsided when liquidity fragments.
Alphora's public examples deliberately lean on market-neutral framing because it makes strategy claims more specific. A premium basket, carry sleeve, or regime-gated portfolio is easier to evaluate when the return is not mostly a disguised bet that crypto goes up.