Each financial position holds a certain amount of beta and then some positive or negative alpha. Understanding the exact composition is hard and also subjective, but a few general guidelines do exist: -What do I know, or what can I do, that others don’t? -Who’s the other side of this trade? For example, if you have the best brains in the space doing a multichain stablecoin arb strategy and have also invested tens of millions in the tech stack, you can be fairly confident that you hold an edge over the rest of the market participants, and if there’s alpha to be gained in that particular strategy, you’ll capture it before everyone else. If, alternatively, your strategy just means depositing your funds into a multi‑billion, widely available strategy, chances are you are just getting beta exposure with a bit - or a lot - of negative alpha in the form of the manager’s fee. Sometimes the product’s alpha is so great that it even offsets the fees. Your job as an investor is to differentiate those opportunities. My main way of selecting market‑neutral strategies is to understand everything that can go wrong and pricing it, but also to peer review my strategies by looking on‑chain and seeing who’s also doing the strategy and what risks they see. Being the smartest or biggest investor on a particular strategy implies a lot of conviction. There are times when I am, but I personally prefer to be in the top 5%. Not the smartest, but still relatively at the top. Tracking smarter people is a good way i've gotten out of tricky situations before they even occur. I understand that my advantage over my peers is that I create an emotion-free investment model, and that I’m able to move fast and get out while the other 95% (non‑professional investors) are sluggish/unwilling to move. In the 2020/2021 era, simply being crypto‑native was enough. There was a huge mispricing of risk, and even horrible traders with big negative alpha managed to make money. This is no longer the case. The space has become sophisticated, and in every decently sized trade there are probably people much smarter than you taking the other side. So what can you possibly have against them? I understand that my current alpha is: -On‑chain analytics -A good alerting system -Fast decision‑making -Proper risk assessments with a predefined thesis and parameters -Good connections This will decay sometime in the future, and I’ll try to pivot to stay relevant in the game I love, the market‑neutral game.