How To Use the Futures Value Finder: A Complete Guide

The Futures Value Finder puts every futures market we can price on one board: Super Bowl winner next to World Series winner, next to the Stanley Cup, next to the Masters. This guide is for anyone betting futures. Read the fair-value section first, because this tool works differently from every other Value Finder we make.

The Basics#

The suite has two tabs: Value Finder (the board) and Insights (what moved this week).

• One tool, every league. NFL, NBA, NHL, MLB, college football, college basketball and the golf majors. Filter by the League column to focus on one sport, or leave it open and shop the whole board at once. Seasonal markets (like World Cup winner) appear on their own when books start pricing them.
• Refreshes less often than the sport Value Finders. Futures move far more slowly than game lines, so there's no need for the fast refresh the daily boards use.
• Everything stays visible. Every selection on every board is listed, including the ones we can't price and the ones with no value. You should be able to browse the whole market, not just our picks.
• Full price history. Futures behave more like a traded asset than a slate, so every selection carries its full price curve from when we started tracking it, not the short window the sport Value Finders use.

Read this part before you bet anything#

The Futures Value Finder works differently from every other Value Finder we make, and if you skip this section the numbers will confuse you.

In the sport Value Finders, fair value is a market consensus. We take the prices across books, remove the vig, weight the books by sharpness, and the result is essentially "what the market really thinks." Because of that, fair value almost always lands somewhere in the middle of the posted prices.

Futures can't work that way, for one simple reason: futures markets are wrong in a measurable, repeatable direction.

We tested this on years of resolved championships: Super Bowls, World Series, NBA Finals, Stanley Cups, college titles and golf majors. After removing the vig, here's how the market's own numbers compared to what actually happened:

This is the favorite-longshot bias, and in futures it's enormous. Longshots are badly overpriced. Real contenders are underpriced.

So the Futures Value Finder does something the other tools don't: it applies a correction fitted on those resolved championships. That makes futures fair value a model number that uses market prices as its input, not a pure read of the market. It's a genuinely different approach, and it's the right one for this market.

When our fair odds are shorter than every book#

Every so often you'll see a row where our fair odds are shorter (lower) than every single price on the board. Something like the Dodgers at a fair value of +157 when the best available price is +210 and no book is under +165.

Your first reaction should be "that looks wrong." That reaction is healthy. It can't happen in our other tools, because a market consensus can never sit outside the market it came from.

Here it can, and it means: we think the entire market is short on this one, not just one book. We put a "!" on those rows so you're never surprised by it. Hover for the explanation.

Three things to know:

1. It's rare. Only a small fraction of priced rows. If it were happening constantly, something would be broken.
2. It only happens on real contenders, which is exactly where the backtest found the market underprices hardest.
3. We deliberately understate it. The correction is capped well below what the historical data supports. We'd rather be too conservative here than too clever.

These are the most aggressive calls on the board. Treat them as such, and size accordingly.

Understanding the Columns#

Selection, League, Market, Resolves#

Selection is the team or player. League is the sport; use it to filter down to one board. Market is the specific future ("Super Bowl Winner", "Masters Winner"). Resolves is roughly when the market settles, which for futures can be months or years out.

Note there's no Line or Side column. Futures are one-sided: you're backing something to win, full stop.

Fair Odds#

Our estimate of the true price, after de-vigging every book's full field and applying the calibration described above.

"Inf." means we refuse to price it. Some selections are such extreme longshots that no honest method can estimate them. Pushing our calibration into the far tail of a college basketball board produced fair values in the tens of millions, which is not a real number. Below a tiny implied probability we publish no fair value, no EV and no stake, and show "Inf." instead.

The row stays on the board with its best price and book coverage. We just won't pretend to know what it's worth. On a typical board a large share of rows are "Inf.". That's the honest answer for a 300-1 college basketball team, and it's by design.

EV %#

How much better the best available price is than our fair value.

Treat EV magnitude as directional, not precise. Futures carry several times the vig of a normal game line, the sample of resolved championships is small, and the same bet can't be re-run. The ranking is trustworthy. The exact percentage is not a promise.

Conf. Adj. Recc. U vs Std. Recc. U#

This works exactly as it does in the other Value Finders, and in futures it matters more than usual.

Std. Recc. U is the raw Kelly stake from the edge alone. Conf. Adj. Recc. U scales that by how much of the total possible book weight actually priced the selection, and sharp books count for far more.

In futures, book coverage varies wildly between markets, so this adjustment does real work. A market the sharpest books price, like the Super Bowl, is barely touched. Markets without Pinnacle, like the golf majors and college basketball, see stakes cut heavily.

A big EV number on a market only a few retail books bother to price is not the same bet as a big EV number on the Super Bowl. Sort by Conf. Adj. Recc. U (that's the default) and this is handled for you.

Coverage, % vs Next, Best Book#

Coverage is how many books quote the selection. Futures coverage is much thinner than game markets; a handful of books is strong here, where it would be unremarkable in NFL player props.

% vs Next is how much better the best price is than the second-best. High numbers mean one book is out of line with the rest.

Best Book is who's posting that price.

Kalshi and Polymarket Prices#

On the Super Bowl, NBA title and Stanley Cup, the board also shows Kalshi (KS) and Polymarket (PM). These exchanges are often the deepest markets for futures, and either can be the best book.

The small grey $ under a Kalshi or Polymarket price is how much money is waiting at that price right now: how much you could bet at it before the price gets worse. +1200 / $4k means about $4,000 is available at +1200. It updates with the board. Sportsbooks don't publish limits, so they never show a $.

What the empty cells mean:

Kalshi +9900 on a deep longshot is Kalshi's floor: the lowest price it allows (1¢). There's often a lot of money sitting there, but it's rarely the best price for a longshot, so compare it with the books.

Polymarket's price is the first price where a real bet fills. Its very best price is often just a few cents' worth, so we show the first price where a meaningful amount can actually be bet, with everything available at that price or better.

Fair odds come from the sportsbooks' consensus. Kalshi or Polymarket can be the best price, and EV is then worked out at that price, but they don't move the fair odds.

Exchange fees are built in. Kalshi and Polymarket charge a small fee to the person taking the price, so the posted price isn't quite what you get. Best book, EV and Recc. U use the after-fee price; the board still shows the posted price (what you'll see in the exchange's app). Kalshi prices carry a small fee tag; hover it (or tap on mobile) for the price after fees. Polymarket prices don't carry the tag, but the fee is still counted in EV and Recc. U.

The 💧 Liquidity columns and 💵 Exchange $ settings work here the same as on the other Value Finders:

• 💧 Liquidity opens Exchange price (the best Kalshi or Polymarket price for that team) and $ you can bet there. Both are sortable.
• 💵 Exchange $ lets you pick an amount. You can then make Best Book, Best Odds and EV use only prices that can actually take that amount. Example: a team shows Polymarket +1289, but only about $150 is behind it; with $5k selected, the best price becomes BetOnline +1200. You can also hide lines with too little behind them, or lines no exchange prices. Everything is off until you tick a box.

The exchange money is information about whether you can get a price and how much, not a sign of value. See Liquidity in the Value Finders guide for what we tested.

Reading a futures price like a stock#

A player prop lives for a few hours. A futures price lives for months, and it moves the whole time, so this tool tracks the whole curve rather than a snapshot.

Every selection has a full-history sparkline. Hover any odds cell and you'll get its price history from when we started tracking it, one reading per day. A team that opened the year around +2700 and sits near +850 today has a season-long story you can't see from today's number alone.

The columns that come with it#

These four live together behind the 📈 Price History button, the same way player details are grouped on the other Value Finders. Click it to bring them onto the board next to the selection name; click the padlock beside it to keep them there on every visit.

Peak Odds: the longest (best-paying) price we have ever recorded for that selection. Hover the cell to see when it peaked, which changes what the number means: +3389 set back in May is a very different statement from +3389 set yesterday.

vs Peak: where today sits against that peak, in payout terms. 0% means you are looking at the best number we have ever seen on it. −35% means the price has shortened a lot since. It's never positive, because the peak includes today.

7d pts and 30d pts: how far the market has moved this selection over the last week and month, in percentage points of implied chance. +1.8 means the market now rates it 1.8 points more likely than it did. Negative means the market has cooled on it.

Two things to know about those last two. They read the same direction as everything on the Insights tab (up is more likely) and they are the same number, so sorting 7d pts high to low hands you this week's steamers without leaving the board.

They are also measured in probability points rather than percentage of odds, and that choice matters more than it sounds. Ranking by odds-% buries favorites: the Dodgers going 39.5% → 38.4% is a bigger real move than a 2% longshot twitching to 2.5%, but in odds terms the longshot looks five times larger. Sorted in points, the top of the column is the market's actual news.

All four are sortable, so "what's moving" and "what's at its best number" are one click away.

Why the movement columns won't match your own arithmetic#

Take today's implied chance, subtract the 7d figure, and you won't land on last week's number. That's deliberate, and it's the most important thing on this page about how we measure movement.

Our fair value is a consensus across the books quoting a market. That means it moves whenever the set of those books moves, even if not one book changes its price. When Pinnacle pulled its college football championship board for a season, LSU's implied chance fell from 5.3% to 4.1% overnight while every other book held its exact number. Pinnacle is the sharpest book in the consensus and had been quoting LSU well short of the field, so its departure took the number down on its own.

That isn't a rare edge case. On most days the book lineup holds and the typical selection barely moves. A large share of all day-to-day movement in these markets happens on the days a book enters or leaves, and on thin college basketball markets the lineup changes constantly. Futures run a handful of books where a game line runs many more, so losing one genuinely reprices the consensus.

So the movement columns are measured like-for-like: only over the books that priced the selection on both days. What you get is what the market actually did. The trade is that it no longer reconciles with today's fair odds, and where too few books priced it throughout to say anything honest, the column is simply blank.

Occasionally you'll see a ! beside one of these figures. That's not a warning about the number. It means our published fair value moved differently over the same span, because that one does include every book. Hover it to see which book came or went and how far the two diverged. It's usually the explanation for EV% shifting more than the movement column did.

The Best Price Ever filter#

Within 3% of the peak, positive EV, and quoted by at least four books.

We deliberately did not call this "buy the dip", because that phrase describes something futures markets don't really do. When a team's price drifts longer, it's usually because the market learned something (an injury, a losing streak), not because the bet is on sale. Prices don't reliably spring back.

What this filter actually says is narrower and more honest: this is the best number ever offered on a selection our fair value independently likes. The value comes from our model disagreeing with the price, not from a prediction that the price will bounce.

How much history each row has#

Not every market has the same amount of history. Some boards, like the Super Bowl and World Series, have been priced for most of the year; others only open a few months before their season.

We track that per row. A "peak" backed by most of a year of history is a much stronger statement than one backed by a few weeks, and where it matters, like the daily Discord post, we say which you're looking at.

The Insights tab#

The Value Finder answers "what's worth betting". The Insights tab answers a different question: what actually moved this week, and how does that fit the season.

It's rebuilt every morning from our own daily price history. No editorial, no predictions.

It only shows moves several books made together#

The board's 7d pts column and this tab report the same number in the same units; they are literally the same figure, computed once. What differs is the standard applied to it. The board shows you every move. Insights shows you only the ones the market made together.

One book correcting a stale line moves a price exactly as much as the whole market repricing it, and from a single column you cannot tell which happened. We measured it: a big share of what a naive filter flags has no real multi-book move behind it. We've seen a double-digit swing on a well-covered team where exactly one book moved.

Insights only lists a selection when several books priced it on both days, and the ones that moved went the same way. That's the difference between "the market repriced this" and "somebody's line was stale." Sort the board by 7d pts and you'll see the same names near the top. Insights is that list with the stale-line noise taken out.

Where a book did enter or leave during the week, the card says so at the end, along with what our own fair value did over the same span. The charts always draw our published number, so they'll show that step even when the headline move doesn't.

Everything is stated as implied probability#

Odds percentages are ambiguous. A longer price is worse for the team and better for you, so "+22%" means opposite things depending on which you had in mind. Every number and every chart on this tab is the market's implied chance, so it reads one way:

↑ green: the market thinks it's more likely. ↓ red: less likely.

The only exception is the best price, which sits in its own badge in that book's colors, because "what can I get" is a genuinely different question from "what does the market believe".

Moves are measured in probability points here too, for the reason described under the price-history columns above: ranking by percentage of odds buries favorites and flatters anything trading near zero.

What you'll see#

Steaming and Fading: this week's movers, split by direction, each with a 7-day curve, an all-time curve, the best price and its book, and a plain-English note on where the move sits.

Charts are labeled all time rather than "season", deliberately: for most of these markets the season hasn't started. It's the window we've held prices for, which is much longer on some markets than others.

All-time high / low flags: a selection at its most or least likely point since we started pricing it, even when the week's move was small. The weekly number is dull; the position isn't.

One thing we're careful about here: a selection carries a separate price curve per edition. A college basketball team has one curve for last year's tournament and another for this year's. Join them and last March's title run bleeds into this season's futures, making a team look far stronger than the market rates them. Everything on this tab is keyed to the edition being priced.

Who the market likes: every championship gets a box, ordered by which settles soonest, with the top contenders drawn on one chart.

That last part is the point of the section. One line at a time tells you a team is sliding; several lines together tell you who is climbing into the gap. Each team is drawn in its own colors where those work as chart lines. We skip a color that's black, white, invisible against the background, or too close to one a higher-ranked contender already took, because a chart full of navy lines defeats the purpose. Its logo sits at the end of its line, so you can read the chart without crossing to the legend.

Hover any contender to light up just their line and see their curves and best price. This is context, not movement: a market can be worth knowing about in a week when nothing happened to it.

Every day is kept. Earlier days collapse to a dated row you can expand, so you can go back and see what the market thought a month ago, which matters here because the raw odds board itself doesn't keep that.

What it won't tell you#

Why a price moved. We looked hard at attaching news to each move automatically and decided against it: the cost was far more than the feature is worth, and an automated explanation is confidently wrong often enough to be a liability on a board people bet real money from.

So a move with no obvious story stays a move with no obvious story. That's frequently the honest answer anyway: futures prices move on money at least as often as on news.

About golf#

Golf is on this board, and you should read it differently from the team sports.

Months before a major, books post odds on only part of the field. We measured how often the eventual winner wasn't even listed at the time, and it happens a meaningful share of the time, even in tournament week. In every team-sport market we checked, every team is priced.

That matters, because if you treat the listed players as though they were the whole field, you overstate every one of them and manufacture value that isn't there. We correct for it by treating the listed golfers as holding only part of the total win probability.

The honest consequence: golf will very rarely flag as value on this board, and that's the correct outcome. Before we corrected this, Scottie Scheffler looked like the single best bet on the board across all four majors. After correcting, he shows negative EV in all four: his fair price is longer than what the books post. The books were right.

Golf stays on the board because these far-out major futures aren't covered anywhere else on the site. The Golf Value Finder prices upcoming tournaments, not next year's majors. Browse them. Just don't expect many green rows.

Pre-Made Filters#

Hover any preset on the board to see its exact criteria.

High Confidence: a solid confidence-adjusted stake and enough books pricing it. The bets where we have both a stakeable edge and enough books to trust it.

Best of Board: the biggest edges that are also well covered.

Outlier Prices: one book well clear of the next best price, with positive EV and enough books. One book badly out of line with the others. Often the most actionable, because you're beating a specific book rather than the whole market.

Best Price Ever: at or near the best price the market has posted, with positive EV and enough books. See The Best Price Ever filter above.

Contender Value: real contenders (not the favorites, not the deep long shots) with a solid edge and enough books. This one comes straight from the backtest: the contender band is where books measurably underprice, and it avoids both the untrustworthy tail and the very top of the board.

A few honest caveats#

We'd rather tell you these than have you find them out yourself.

• Futures tie up your bankroll for months. A +EV futures bet at +2000 that resolves in February is not the same asset as a +EV player prop tonight, even at identical EV. Price that into your staking.
• The edge is real but its size is uncertain. Our backtest is positive, but a few lucky events carry a lot of it. Believe the direction; don't bank on the magnitude.
• College basketball is the weakest market on the board. It was the weakest league in our backtest, on the thinnest book coverage and the widest vig. Its low coverage weight already cuts stakes heavily, and we'd still treat it with extra caution.
• No betslip deep links here. The odds feed doesn't provide selection IDs for futures markets, so unlike the sport Value Finders you'll need to find these bets in your book manually.
• Shop the board. As always, the edge assumes you're getting the best listed price. Take a worse number and you may be giving the whole edge away.