I imagine if you don't want net exposures, it's harder to cover and make compelling shorts for complex sectors like biotech.
Consumers on the other hand, I imagine being fairly easy. Or maybe something macro-driven like mortgage finance?
What sector would you want to cover under a market-neutral framework like citadel or p72?
Buy-side investors in consumer know with high certainty what the company is going to print on revenue/comps a week after the quarter ends. This is true in no other sector. This has caused investing in the sector, especially at the pods, to become extremely short-term focused, where people monitor alt data on a daily basis and react to small inflections. It also makes the trading dynamics extremely complicated. Buy-side bogey and fund positioning are now complicated second- and third-order game theoretic questions because you have to imagine what your peer investors are doing, given that they have the same alt data as you and are thinking through the same problems.
As someone who works in the field, biotech is easier to understand than people think especially from a long-short perspective. Happy to give a "crash course" in things to look out for in companies that will either make them succeed or flop. Have seen it many many time over and over again almost like clockwork over the years.