Learn / Feature intuition
Answer page / feature intuition
Topic cluster / Signal and portfolio designA regime filter is a context signal that decides when a strategy should trade, size down, or step aside because the environment has changed.
What to remember
A regime filter is not usually a stock-picking signal on its own. It is a classifier or overlay that says the current environment is friendly, hostile, or ambiguous for a downstream strategy.
Instead of asking what to buy or sell directly, it asks whether your core edge is being deployed in conditions where it historically made sense.
For example, a fast mean-reversion strategy can look great in calm tape and terrible in liquidation cascades. A regime filter exists to prevent you from pretending those environments are the same.
A good regime filter should make a strategy more honest, not more mysterious. The output should still be explainable to a skeptical PM or teammate.
Alphora's realized-vol regime page treats regime as a reusable context building block. That means it can gate or resize other strategies, and the examples show how it behaves as a layer in the composition rather than as a standalone return stream.