Deriv Synthetic Indices: What They Are and What Actually Differs Between Them
Volatility, one-second, Boom, Crash and Jump indices explained: how they tick, which contract prices change from one index to the next, which do not, and what that means for bots.
Markets made by a computer
Synthetic indices are markets Deriv generates itself. They are not linked to a currency, a company or a commodity, and nobody buys or sells them on an exchange. Deriv produces each new price from its own random process, set to a fixed level of volatility. The markets run every day of the year, including weekends and holidays, and there is no economic news that moves them.
That makes them very different from forex and gold. There are no sessions, no central bank meetings and no weekend gaps. It also means there is nothing to analyse in the usual sense: no trend caused by buyers, no reaction to data. Price moves because the generator moves it.
The main families
- Volatility indices, such as Volatility 10, 25, 50, 75 and 100. The number is the level of volatility the generator is set to: Volatility 100 moves about ten times as much as Volatility 10, in percentage terms.
- One-second volatility indices, shown with (1s) in their names. They tick every second; the standard versions tick every two seconds.
- Boom and Crash indices, which drift gently and then spike up (Boom) or down (Crash) at random moments, on average once in the number of ticks in the name.
- Jump indices, which move normally with occasional large jumps in either direction.
Contracts you can trade on them
Deriv offers several contract types on synthetic indices. Digit contracts settle on the last digit of a tick price: Even/Odd, Over/Under and Matches/Differs. Rise/Fall contracts pay if the price is higher or lower after a few ticks. Multipliers act like a leveraged position with a stop-out, and Accumulators grow in value each tick that price stays inside a narrow range. DONKOFX bots use digit contracts, Multipliers and Accumulators, and the strategy bots can trade volatility indices through Multipliers with a fixed take profit and stop loss.
What is the same on every index
Digit contract prices do not depend on the index. When DONKOFX collected live Deriv quotes in October 2026, every digit contract paid exactly the same on all ten volatility indices, at one tick and at five ticks. A winning $1 even or odd contract returns about 84.5 cents of profit, whichever index you choose.
The digits themselves behave the same way too. Across more than 55 million recorded ticks on five indices, every digit appeared within 0.02 percentage points of 10%, and more than 2,500 statistical tests for patterns by streak, hour, weekday and month found nothing beyond what chance alone produces. No index has friendlier digits than another.
What changes from one index to the next
- Tick speed: one-second indices tick twice as often as the standard ones, so a bot places contracts faster and reaches its limits sooner.
- Price precision: Volatility 75 quotes four decimals, while Volatility 100 and the one-second indices quote two. The digit read is always the last decimal shown.
- Ties on Rise/Fall: a tie loses, and ties are more common on two-decimal indices. About 3.1% of one-tick moves on Volatility 100 were ties, against close to none on Volatility 75.
- Allowed multipliers: from 40 to 400 on Volatility 100, 50 to 500 on Volatility 75, 80 to 800 on Volatility 50, 160 to 1,600 on Volatility 25 and 400 to 4,000 on Volatility 10.
- Accumulator ranges: the band price must stay inside scales with the index's volatility.
Choosing an index for a bot
For digit bots, the choice of index changes speed, not odds. A one-second index runs a session twice as fast, which is useful if you want short sessions and dangerous if a recovery series is involved, because a bad streak arrives sooner. A standard index gives you more time to follow what is happening.
For Rise/Fall, prefer indices where ties are rare, because every tie is a loss. For Multipliers, check that the multiplier you choose is allowed on the index; a setting that is valid on Volatility 25 can be rejected on Volatility 100.
Beware of ranking noise
If you test a strategy on ten indices and ten settings, one combination will always look best over a few weeks, purely by chance. Picking that winner and expecting it to continue is one of the most common mistakes in synthetic trading. Judge an idea on months of data it was not chosen on, count how many combinations you tried, and remember that digit outcomes are random on every index.
Running bots on synthetic indices sensibly
- Start on a Deriv demo account, which has virtual funds.
- Prefer flat stakes and short sessions with Profit Lock on.
- Run the Risk of Ruin Simulator for the exact contract before using any recovery steps.
- Set a session loss limit you could lose in full without concern.
- Set your session limit and Profit Lock before you start, and judge a bot over many sessions rather than one.