A market that never closes
Synthetic indices
Synthetic indices are instruments a broker generates rather than instruments that exist in a market. They trade around the clock, including weekends, and among the nine brokers we track only Deriv offers them — with families for sudden crashes and booms, constant volatilities from 10% to 250%, and fixed-step price movement.
Conditions checked against each broker's own pages
The families Deriv publishes
The families Deriv publishes, with the parameters it states for each. There is no comparison table of brokers here because there is nothing to compare: no other broker on our list offers the instrument.
| Family | How it behaves | Published parameters |
|---|---|---|
| Crash and Boom Indices | Prices drift steadily and then break — Crash indices fall suddenly, Boom indices spike upward | Frequencies of 50, 150, 300, 500, 600, 900 or 1,000 ticks, setting how often on average the market crashes or booms |
| Volatility Indices | Continuous price movement at a constant, chosen level of volatility | Volatilities from 10% to 250%, with ticks every two seconds or every second for the faster variants |
| Hybrid Indices | Crash and Boom behaviour with a volatility boost, combining steady patterns with jumps | A 20% volatility boost, with movements based on real markets |
| Volatility Switch Indices | Volatility that changes regime while you hold the position | Levels of 10%, 50% or 100%, each lasting 5 to 60 minutes on average |
| Step Indices | Price moves one fixed step per tick, up or down, with no trends or gaps | Steps of 0.1, 0.2, 0.3, 0.4 or 0.5 per tick |
| Drift Switching Indices | Instruments that shift between bullish, bearish and sideways regimes | Shifts averaging 10, 20 or 30 minutes |
| Trek Indices | Mostly small price changes with a distribution skewed toward larger moves in one chosen direction | Up or down variants at 30% volatility with built-in directional bias |
Scroll the table sideways →
Families and parameters as Deriv publishes them, read on 24 August 2026. There is no broker comparison on this page because no other broker on our list offers the instrument — a synthetic index is generated by the broker rather than resold between brokers.
What a synthetic index actually is
It is a price series produced by an algorithm rather than by buyers and sellers. Nothing underlies a Volatility 75 index — there is no asset, no order book and no external market whose quotes could be compared against the broker's. The instrument is defined by its parameters: a volatility level, a tick interval, a crash frequency.
That design is what makes the headline feature possible. Because no exchange has to be open, synthetic indices trade 24 hours a day including weekends and public holidays, which is the reason most people look for them in the first place — the weekend is the one time a forex trader has nothing else to trade.
It also makes them predictable in a specific, narrow sense. A Step index moves by a fixed amount per tick; a Volatility 75 index has a stated volatility that does not change with news. Nothing in a real market behaves that way, and for testing a mechanical system that consistency is genuinely useful.
The conflict that comes with the design
On a currency pair the broker quotes a price derived from an outside market, and a client who suspects manipulation can compare the quote with any other source. On a synthetic index there is no other source. The broker generates the price, quotes it, and is the counterparty to your trade on it.
That is not an accusation against anyone — it is the structure of the product, and it applies to every synthetic instrument at every broker offering one. It does mean the choice of broker carries more weight here than anywhere else on this site, because the usual external check does not exist.
Which makes the entity behind the account the thing to look at: which company holds it, which regulator supervises that company, and what happens if it fails. For synthetic indices specifically, that question is the entire due diligence available to you.
Who offers them
Of the nine brokers we track, Deriv alone. Its Derived Indices are its own instruments, they are why its platform lists products no MetaTrader broker can match, and they cannot be traded through anyone else — a genuinely exclusive product in a market where almost nothing is.
Bybit and HTX offer crypto perpetual contracts that also trade at weekends, which answers the same «something to trade on Sunday» need through an entirely different instrument. That is worth knowing if weekend access rather than synthetic behaviour is what you are after.
The rest — RoboForex, Alpari, Tickmill, FxPro, LiteFinance, ForTrade, Libertex — publish nothing of this kind. A comparison page listing five brokers for synthetic indices is either counting crypto or counting brands that resell the same product, and neither applies here.
What to check before trading one
The parameters, because they are the instrument. A Crash 1000 index crashes once every thousand ticks on average and a Crash 300 three times as often; a Volatility 250 index moves an order of magnitude more than a Volatility 10. Choosing between them is choosing the market you trade, not a setting on a chart.
The leverage and margin, which follow the entity as everywhere else. Deriv's European company works under MFSA limits while its offshore entities publish considerably more.
And the position size, with more care than usual. A 250% volatility instrument moving continuously at that rate does not resemble EUR/USD in any respect, and sizing habits carried over from currency pairs are not transferable.
Questions people ask
What are synthetic indices?
Price series generated by an algorithm rather than by a market. They have no underlying asset and no external reference price, which is why they can trade 24 hours a day including weekends, and why their behaviour is defined by parameters like volatility level, tick speed or crash frequency.
Which brokers offer synthetic indices?
Of the nine we track, only Deriv, where they are called Derived Indices. They cannot be traded at another broker — the instruments are the broker's own. Bybit and HTX offer crypto perpetuals that also trade at weekends, which is a different instrument answering a similar need.
Do synthetic indices trade on weekends?
Yes — round-the-clock access including weekends and public holidays, which is the main reason traders look for them. No exchange has to be open for a generated price series to keep moving.
What is Volatility 75?
One of Deriv's Volatility Indices, an instrument with a constant stated volatility. The family runs from 10% to 250%, with tick intervals of one or two seconds depending on the variant, so the number in the name is the volatility level rather than a price.
What are Boom and Crash indices?
Instruments that drift and then break sharply: Crash indices fall suddenly, Boom indices spike. Deriv publishes frequencies of 50, 150, 300, 500, 600, 900 and 1,000 ticks, which set how often on average the break happens.
Are synthetic indices risky?
They carry the ordinary risks of leveraged trading plus one specific to the design: the broker generates the price, quotes it and takes the other side, with no external market to compare against. That makes the entity behind your account and its regulator the whole of the due diligence available.
Getting the terminal itself is a different question — which version to download and where from. The full cost arithmetic for every account here is on what a trade actually costs, and a demo account Crash and Boom specifically, with their frequencies and what the asymmetry does to stops, are on Boom and Crash indices, and the constant-volatility ones on Volatility 75. Because the price has no external reference, the company behind the account matters more here than anywhere — which entity holds it and what it protects. Deriv's own review is on our Deriv page.