Strategy Overview

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Our approach

Tori generates rewards through market-neutral trading strategies of the kind institutional trading desks and money market participants have run for decades. These strategies are fundamentally different from speculating on whether markets go up or down. Instead, they capture returns from pricing opportunities: predictable price relationships that temporarily diverge. Why market-neutral? Traditional yield sources are often correlated with market performance. When markets crash, yields typically compress or disappear just when you need them most. Market-neutral strategies aim to generate returns regardless of market direction. Whether markets rise, fall, or move sideways, the objective remains constant: systematically capture pricing opportunities rather than betting on market movements.

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Strategy types

Tori runs several complementary strategies, and the set can expand as conditions change, provided a new strategy keeps the market-neutral mandate.

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Money markets

How money market strategies work

Money markets are usually our largest allocation. The opportunity is access: institutional short-term lending rates that retail participants normally cannot reach.Capital goes into high-quality, short-duration instruments at wholesale rates across global markets. Duration risk is kept low, liquidity is kept high, and any non-USD exposure is hedged at rates only institutional reach and scale make possible.These instruments have minimal price sensitivity, which is what keeps the strategy market-neutral: the return comes from the rate, not from price moves.

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Futures arbitrage

How futures arbitrage works

Futures contracts often trade at a premium or discount to spot prices. That difference, called the basis, is generally predictable and can be captured.When futures trade at a premium, the desk buys the asset in the spot market and simultaneously sells the equivalent futures contract. Positions are closed as soon as the basis compresses; if it doesn’t compress early, they are carried to expiry, where the two prices converge by construction.A simplified example:

• AAPL spot price: $200
• AAPL futures: $200.30 (0.15% premium)
• Buy spot, sell futures
• Minutes to hours later the basis compresses and both positions are closed
• The trade captures 0.10% (~$0.20 per share)
• Hundreds of such trades a day let small gains accumulate

Actual execution involves additional considerations, such as funding rates and margin requirements.The long spot and short futures legs offset each other. If AAPL rises or falls, gains on one side offset losses on the other; the return comes solely from the basis.

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Calendar spreads

How calendar spreads work

The trade here is the relationship between two futures contracts on the same asset with different expiry dates. That relationship sometimes drifts from fair value.When near-term and far-term contracts are mispriced against each other, the desk buys one, sells the other, and closes both once the relationship normalizes.For example: March AAPL futures at $200, June at $204. That is a 2% spread against a historical fair value of 1%. Buy March, sell June, and the excess spread is captured when it normalizes.Direction doesn’t enter into it. The position’s return comes from the gap between the two contracts, not from where AAPL itself goes.

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The market-neutral principle

All of Tori’s strategies share the same design rules:

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What this means in practice

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Risk management

Controls apply at three levels. Positions. Each asset, venue, and strategy carries a maximum exposure, no single position is allowed to dominate the portfolio, and adverse moves trigger automatic position reduction. The portfolio. Value-at-Risk limits run across the whole book. Correlation analysis checks that the strategies stay genuinely diversified, stress tests cover extreme scenarios, and liquidity is managed so redemptions can be met. Operations. Positions are watched around the clock, circuit breakers cut risk automatically in extreme conditions, critical operations require multiple approvals (see Roles and timelocks), and protocol reserves are kept separate from operating funds.

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What we aim to avoid

Some exposures are excluded by design. Every position is delta-hedged, so there is no directional bet. Capital is spread across assets and instruments, so no single name can dominate. Trading stays in liquid markets and regulated products. Non-USD exposure is hedged. And the protocol deals only with established counterparties.

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Transparency and verification

Reserves are attested continuously by Accountable; the live dashboard at tori.accountable.capital is public and anyone can check it. The rest of the security stack, monitoring by Hypernative and audits by Sherlock and Nethermind, is laid out in Security. The current reward rate is shown in the app. Displayed APY is the trailing 7 days of realized performance, annualized with daily compounding.

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How the strategies behave

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Temporary drawdowns are normal

Delta-neutral positions can show paper losses before they converge. The two legs are built to offset each other, but a market move sometimes reaches one leg before the other. As positions converge the fluctuation resolves; it is typically not a permanent loss.

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Risk considerations

See Risk Disclosures for complete information.

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Next steps