Late surge of bets has Sonny Styles favored to go No. 4 overall

The key signal here is not the draft board itself, but the speed and direction of the money flow: when late action moves a position from a presumed consensus outcome to a live alternative, the market is usually pricing information about role fit, not just player quality. That tends to matter most in the 48-72 hours before the draft, when books are forced to shade aggressively and the final move often overshoots the true probability. In other words, the edge is less about predicting the pick and more about identifying where the public narrative is being forced to catch up to sharper positioning.

The second-order effect is on derivative-style draft markets tied to top-five outcomes. If the field is now more open than assumed, the implied volatility of the fourth pick should stay elevated, and that creates better pricing for structured bets that benefit from one of several outcomes rather than a single-name outright. The most attractive asymmetry is fading the crowd’s tendency to extrapolate one late move into a broader regime change; these markets often revert once limits are raised and the last wave of speculative money gets matched.

The contrarian read is that the move may be less about a true belief in the alternative and more about a liquidity squeeze in a thin market. When one option becomes too crowded, the price can gap simply because books need balance, not because the underlying probability changed materially. That means the best trade is often not to chase the new favorite, but to express the view that the uncertainty around picks 2-4 remains underpriced relative to how binary the board now looks.

If the late money is real, the near-term catalyst is draft-night reporting and any final information leakage on team preferences; if it’s not, the reversal can happen within hours as the market reprices back toward the original consensus. The risk is being early into a headline-driven market where the last 10% of flow can dominate the tape. For investors using these markets as sentiment indicators, the right horizon is days, not months.