Hedge fund allocators love clean categories. My fund never gave them one — and that ended up working in our favor.
We traded futures, so technically we were a CTA.
But every trade was constructed to be beta neutral and currency neutral — closer to market neutral.
Our average holding period was 24 hours — closer to short-term trading.
We never fit cleanly into any bucket, and that created friction. Some allocators need a clean category to justify an allocation internally.
But we believed the strategy's uniqueness was the point, not something to apologize for. Our job wasn't to force ourselves into a category — it was to help the allocator understand why we didn't fit one.
When they understood that, the allocation usually followed.
A strategy that's hard to label probably isn't moving in sync with the rest of someone's portfolio either.
That's not a weakness. That's how the best risk-adjusted portfolios get built — from strategies that each generate positive returns, but at different times, for different reasons.
Sometimes the most valuable strategies are the ones that don't fit neatly into anyone's spreadsheet.