Any market neutral strategy that supports multi-billion deployment is, more likely than not, very risk-adjusted. Looking for alpha there is an unproductive endeavour. Smarter people than you have already placed it at its equilibrium rate. At any meaningful scale, the market neutral game is simply optimising for the most direct and lowest fee exposure to the underwritten risk. Fees paid to third parties eat directly into your risk compensation, pushing you negative. Fees/friction are unavoidable, and these get steeper at smaller scales. A large enough fund will own different parts of the stack and save on fees. For each multi-billion deployment the most important factor to consider is heat loss introduced by intermediaries. Smaller portfolios should look for smaller opportunities that are not large enough size to be properly arbitraged by sophisticated actors.