Synthetic indices, explained

Synthetic indices are Deriv's own simulated markets. They behave like currency pairs but aren't tied to any real asset — so they trade 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and no central bank announcement can blow up your position mid-run. For automated trading that predictability is the entire appeal.

What they actually are

Each index is generated by a random number generator, producing a continuous price series with a fixed, published volatility. A Volatility 75 Index simulates a market with 75% constant volatility; Volatility 10 simulates a much calmer one. Nothing about them responds to news, earnings, sessions or liquidity — the statistical behaviour is the same at 3am on a Sunday as at midday on a Tuesday.

That has three practical consequences for anyone running a bot:

• Your bot can run at any hour, which matters when you're trading around a day job.
• Backtests mean something. Because the generating process doesn't change, a simulation over a million trades describes the same market you'll trade tomorrow — which is why the backtester can give you a real probability of ruin rather than a guess.
• Technical analysis doesn't transfer. Support, resistance, news patterns and session behaviour have nothing to attach to here. Strategies on synthetics are about staking and risk control, not chart reading.

The two families

Standard volatility indices — a tick every 2 seconds

1-second indices — a tick every second

The same idea at double the speed, spanning 1HZ10V through 1HZ300V — including 15, 25, 30, 50, 75, 90, 100, 150, 200, 250 and 300. A five-tick contract settles in five seconds rather than ten.

Speed is a double-edged thing for a bot. Twice the ticks means twice the trades per hour, which means you reach your profit target — or your loss threshold — in half the time. If you're testing a new strategy, the standard 2-second indices give you more time to watch what it's doing and pull it if something's off.

Boom & Crash — a third family, built differently

Volatility indices are a single continuous random walk with no built-in direction. Boom and Crash indices are something else entirely: a steady drift punctuated by a sudden, sharp spike the other way. That difference changes how staking risk behaves, especially for recovery strategies. Full Boom & Crash guide →

Step, Jump and Range Break — three more built-in mechanics

Three further families, each built around a different departure from a plain random walk:

• Step Index — fixed 0.1 increments each tick, no percentage volatility at all.
• Jump Index — trades like a standard volatility index, except roughly every 20 minutes it jumps hard in either direction.
• Range Break — oscillates inside a band, then breaks out after roughly 100 or 200 attempts depending on which one you pick.

Which market should your bot trade?

For digit contracts — Even/Odd, Over/Under, Matches/Differs — the honest answer is that the choice of market barely matters. Every volatility index draws its last digit uniformly from 0–9, so the odds on Digit Over 1 are identical on V10 and V100. What changes is how fast the ticks arrive and how the payout is quoted. More on digit contracts →

For Rise/Fall contracts, volatility affects how far price travels within your duration:

• V10 and V25 — steadier, and generally where people start. Easier to watch a bot run without anxiety.
• V50 — a reasonable middle ground for longer sessions.
• V75 and V100 — the biggest movers and the most popular in trading communities. That popularity comes from the size of the swings, which cuts both ways precisely as you'd expect.

For Accumulators, volatility is the whole game — a lower-volatility index stays inside a given barrier for longer. More on Accumulators →

The one thing everyone gets wrong

A higher volatility index is not a higher-return index. Deriv prices each contract against the actual behaviour of the market it's written on, so the house edge on V75 is essentially the same as on V10 — you're taking bigger swings for the same expected outcome, which means faster results in both directions and a bumpier equity curve.

If you want to see the difference concretely rather than argue about it, run the same strategy on two markets through the backtester and compare the equity curves.

Trading them with a bot

Every market above is selectable in the bot builder, in every quick strategy, and in all twelve free bots — changing market is a single dropdown. You can also watch the last-digit behaviour of every synthetic market side by side in the digit analysis tools, which is the fastest way to get a feel for how they differ.

Related: Boom & Crash strategy · Volatility 75 explained · digit contracts explained · Accumulators explained · build your first bot