What synthetic indices are, in plain terms
Synthetic indices (Deriv also calls them derived indices) are price series that Deriv creates itself. They are not shares, currencies or commodities, and they do not track any real market. According to Deriv's market pages, checked in October 2026, they are generated by a cryptographically secure random number generator and are designed to behave like markets with a set level of volatility or a set pattern of jumps, spikes or steps.
Three consequences follow, and they matter more than any strategy:
- No real-world asset sits behind them. You cannot buy "Volatility 75" anywhere except from Deriv. There is no exchange, no other broker quoting it, and no independent price to compare against.
- News does not move them. Deriv states that external news events do not affect the price. Interest-rate decisions, earnings and wars are irrelevant.
- Deriv is the source of the price. With a forex CFD, the broker passes on or marks up a price formed in a global market. With a synthetic index, the price is produced by Deriv's own system. Deriv's pages describe the generator as cryptographically secure, but the market pages we read did not name an independent auditor of the generator, so you are relying on Deriv's own description and its regulators' oversight.
Deriv's own wording on technical analysis is unusually candid: because there is no order book, it says any historical patterns are "purely coincidental", with the exception of Range Break indices, where channel behaviour is built into the design.
The main families, explained
Deriv lists 105 synthetic instruments. They fall into families defined by the rule that generates them. All figures below are Deriv's own descriptions.
| Family | How Deriv says it behaves | What that means for you |
|---|---|---|
| Volatility indices (e.g. Volatility 10, 25, 50, 75, 100 and higher, up to 250%) | Constant volatility at the stated level; "1s" versions tick every second, standard versions every 2 seconds | Volatility 75 moves roughly 7.5 times as much as Volatility 10, all the time |
| Crash and Boom | Crash indices drift up then drop sharply; Boom indices drift down then spike up. The number (50 to 1,000) is the average number of ticks between events | Boom 1000 spikes on average once every 1,000 ticks; the timing of any single spike is random |
| Jump indices | Behave like a volatility index but jump sharply about every 20 minutes on average; volatility options from 10% to 100% | Stops can be gapped by a jump |
| Step indices | Each tick moves up or down by a fixed step (0.1 to 0.5 depending on the index) | Very regular motion, no wild swings, but no edge either |
| Multi Step and Skew Step | Mostly small steps, occasionally larger ones; Skew Step makes small moves 80% or 90% likely, with larger moves the rest of the time | Small frequent moves in one direction, with rarer bigger moves the other way |
| Range Break | Price bounces inside a range and breaks out after an average of 100 or 200 boundary hits | The one family where Deriv says channel analysis can apply |
| DEX | Large spikes or drops every 10, 15 or 25 minutes on average, with small moves between | Similar to Crash/Boom but timed in minutes |
| Drift Switch | Switches between bullish, bearish and sideways regimes averaging 10, 20 or 30 minutes | Trends exist but their length is random |
| Volatility Switch | Alternates between 10%, 50% and 100% volatility regimes lasting 5 to 60 minutes on average | Position size that is fine in one regime is too big in the next |
| Daily Reset, Trek, Hybrid | Simulated daily bull or bear trends that reset to a baseline; skewed distributions; Crash/Boom behaviour with added volatility | Read each contract's description before trading |
Trading hours are 24/7 for most of these, including weekends and public holidays (Sunday 00:00 to Saturday 24:00 GMT). A few basket-type instruments follow weekday hours.