Boom & Crash, explained

Boom and Crash indices are built differently from the rest of Deriv's synthetic markets. Instead of a smooth random walk, each one trends steadily in one direction and then, without warning, spikes hard the other way. That single design choice changes how you should think about risk here more than any staking plan does.

What's actually happening

Boom indices drift downward most of the time, punctuated by a sudden sharp spike up. Crash indices do the mirror opposite: they drift upward most of the time, punctuated by a sudden sharp spike down. The number in the name is how often the spike shows up on average — a spike every 1,000 ticks, 500 ticks, or 300 ticks:

The lower the number, the more often the spike arrives — Boom 300 and Crash 300 are the most spike-frequent, most volatile members of the family.

How this differs from Volatility indices

Volatility indices — V10 through V100 — are a single continuous random walk with no built-in direction. Boom and Crash are two overlapping processes: a steady drift plus an engineered, discontinuous jump. That difference matters for anything you build on top of the price series, not just for which direction you'd bet.

What people actually trade here

The most direct way to trade the mechanic is a Rise/Fall position with the drift rather than against it — Fall on a Boom index, Rise on a Crash index — collecting the steady drift while accepting that the spike, whenever it lands, moves against that position hard and fast. Betting against the drift means the reverse: you're waiting specifically for the spike, and losing steadily until it arrives.

The Martingale-into-a-spike problem

A staking plan like Martingale assumes a bad run costs you a predictable, escalating sequence of losses that one win reverses. That assumption is built for a smooth market, where no single tick moves the price by more than a normal step. On Boom or Crash, the spike is not a normal step — it's specifically designed to be a large, discontinuous move. A recovery ladder that happens to be positioned against the spike when it lands doesn't lose the next step in the sequence; it can lose far more than the ladder's own logic ever accounted for, in one trade instead of a gradual, bounded losing streak.

Digit contracts on Boom/Crash — verify before you assume

Digit contracts are technically available here too, but be careful what you carry over from digit contracts elsewhere on this site. The uniform, independent last-digit behaviour we've verified with a chi-square test is checked specifically on the standard volatility indices — a smooth, single-process random walk. Boom and Crash are built from a drift plus an engineered spike, which is a different kind of price series, and we haven't made the same claim here. Run the digit analysis tool on the Boom/Crash market you're considering and look at the live distribution yourself before assuming the digit odds behave the same way.

Run it in Binary Pro

1. Open the Bot Builder and select a Boom or Crash market from the symbol list.
2. Choose Rise/Fall as the trade type, set your direction, duration, stake and — especially here — a tight maximum stake.
3. Test the settings on a demo account first, and watch how the bot behaves through at least one live spike.

Related: synthetic indices explained · Rise/Fall strategy · test a strategy before running it live

Illustrative figures are rounded and spike timing is an average, not a guarantee — a market can run well past or well short of its average interval. Risk disclosure.