Deriv synthetic indices explained: Volatility, Crash, Boom, Jump and Step

Synthetic indices are the markets most Deriv bots trade. They are not currencies, stocks or commodities, and understanding what they actually are changes how you think about strategies built on them.

What they are

A synthetic index is a price series generated by a random number process, published continuously by Deriv. There is no underlying asset. Nothing is being bought or sold in a wider market.

Two consequences follow, and both matter.

They trade all day, every day. There is no market close, no weekend gap, no holiday. A bot can run at any hour.

They have no external causes. No news moves them, no economic release, no central bank. There is nothing to research and no fundamental analysis to do. Technical patterns appear in the chart because random series produce patterns, not because anything is driving them.

The families

Volatility indices are the most commonly traded. They come in levels, roughly 10 through 100, where the number indicates how much the price moves. Volatility 10 is comparatively calm, Volatility 100 swings hard.

Many volatility indices also come in a one second variant, which publishes a tick every second rather than every two. The generating process is the same. What changes is the pace: a bot on a one second index places trades roughly twice as fast, so both wins and losses accumulate more quickly, and so does exposure to the margin.

Crash and Boom behave asymmetrically. Crash indices drift upward with occasional sharp drops. Boom indices drift downward with occasional sharp spikes. The number in the name, from 300 up to 1000, indicates roughly how many ticks pass on average between spikes. These are available across the range on BinaryTick.

Jump indices move in steps rather than smoothly, with sudden level changes at intervals. They run from Jump 10 to Jump 200. Our Rise / Fall Switcher bot defaults to Jump 50, and its card notes the consequence directly: jump indices move in sudden steps, so runs of losses can arrive in bursts.

Step Index moves in fixed increments, one step at a time, up or down.

Range Break trades within a range and then breaks out of it.

Which to run a bot on

Since none of these are predictable, the choice is about the behaviour you want to sit through rather than about finding an easier market.

Higher volatility means larger price movements, which matters for contracts that depend on how far price travels, such as Rise/Fall over several ticks. It matters much less for digit contracts, which settle on the last digit and are equally random on any of them.

The tick rate matters more than most people expect. A one second index doubles your trade frequency at the same settings. If a strategy is marginal, running it twice as fast does not improve it, it just gets you to the outcome sooner.

The asymmetric families, Crash and Boom, are the ones where strategy choice is least intuitive. A bot that does well during the long drift can be undone by a single spike, so the interesting question is always what happens on the spike rather than what happens between them.

What does not transfer

Analysis habits from real markets do not carry over. Support and resistance levels, chart patterns and trend lines all describe crowd behaviour, and there is no crowd here. A level that held three times held by coincidence.

This is not an argument against using indicators. Our SMA Trend, SMA Reversion, RSI Reversal and Bollinger Bounce bots all use them, and they are useful as ways of defining a consistent, testable entry rule. The card on SMA Reversion is honest about what that buys you: it is included as the mirror of SMA Trend, and neither direction of the rule has an edge.

An indicator on a synthetic index gives you a rule. It does not give you a forecast.

Where to start

Pick one index and stay on it long enough to learn how it behaves. Switching markets after a losing session is the fastest way to learn nothing, because you never accumulate enough trades on any one of them to see past the noise.

Every strategy on BinaryTick has a default market chosen to suit it, and every account starts on a demo balance, so trying several costs nothing but time.