What makes a trade market neutral in practice?

A trade is market neutral when the broad market move you do not want is mostly cancelled out, so the remaining PnL is driven by spread behavior, relative value, or a narrower thesis. That does not require zero correlation to everything. It requires the unwanted exposure to be small enough that it does not dominate the result.

In live trading, this usually means being clear about which beta you are neutralizing. Broad crypto beta, coin-specific beta, sector beta, and event-linked beta are different problems, so one generic offset rarely solves all of them.

Equal long and short notionals can still leave a trade very directional if the legs have different volatility, different sensitivity to the benchmark, or different nonlinear behavior.

Practical neutrality is something you test, not something you declare. Useful checks include rolling beta to the benchmark you care about, PnL during large benchmark moves, and whether the hedged spread behaves more stably than the raw trade.

The right target is not perfection. The right target is a residual exposure that is small enough and stable enough for the intended edge to show through.

On Alphora, the clean way to think about neutrality is to treat the hedge as part of the strategy definition. Document the benchmark, the hedge rule, the refresh cadence, and the exact reason the hedge exists, then compare the raw and hedged runs with the same execution assumptions and paper-trading discipline.