Volatility 75 index

The volatility family

Volatility levels as Deriv publishes them. The number is the constant volatility of the generated series — not a price, not a level, and not the CBOE VIX.

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Read from Deriv's own Derived Indices page on 24 August 2026. The family is published as a range from 10% to 250%; the variants listed here are the commonly traded points on it, and spreads for each sit in the contract specification inside the platform.

It is not the VIX, and the confusion costs money

The CBOE Volatility Index — the VIX — is a real market index measuring expected volatility on the S&P 500 over the next thirty days. It rises when equity markets fall, it is published by an exchange, and it can be traded through futures and options at brokers that offer them.

Volatility 75 is a synthetic instrument generated by Deriv, with a volatility parameter fixed at 75%. It has no underlying market, no relationship to equities, and no connection to the VIX beyond a number that appears in both names. Someone searching for «VIX 75» is usually looking for this instrument, and someone who buys it expecting exposure to equity volatility has bought something else entirely.

Nothing about that is hidden — Deriv calls the family Volatility Indices and describes them as synthetic. The confusion comes from third-party content that uses the two names interchangeably, and it is worth resolving before rather than after opening a position.

What the 75 actually refers to

The volatility level of the generated series, held constant. A Volatility 10 index wanders gently; a Volatility 250 index moves an order of magnitude more, continuously and without pause. The number is a setting on the generator rather than a price, a level or a strike.

Constant is the operative word. Real markets have volatility that clusters — quiet weeks and violent days around releases — while these instruments do not: their movement does not respond to news, sessions or liquidity, because there is nothing outside them to respond to. Deriv states this directly, describing them as free from real-world impact.

For testing mechanical systems that property is genuinely useful, since the market's character does not shift underneath the strategy. For discretionary trading it removes every contextual cue that a real chart carries.

The second parameter: tick speed

Each variant comes in a normal version with a tick every two seconds and a fast version with a tick every second. Doubling the tick rate doubles how much of the instrument's movement passes through a given minute, which changes the strategy far more than it sounds.

In practice the fast variants magnify everything about the account: costs are paid more often, stops are reached sooner in wall-clock time, and a strategy tuned on the normal variant does not transfer. Treat them as separate instruments rather than as a display setting.

Position sizing is the whole discipline here

Deriv publishes leverage of up to 1:1000 on selected synthetic instruments, and these move continuously, at weekends, with a volatility that never calms down. Sizing habits carried over from EUR/USD — which spends much of its day moving very little — do not survive contact with a 75% volatility instrument, let alone a 250% one.

The arithmetic is the same as everywhere else on this site: work out what a normal adverse move costs on your intended position, and require that the account survive several of them in a row. On a constant-volatility instrument, «normal adverse move» is at least a defined quantity, which is one of the few things these instruments make easier.

The rest of the discipline is unchanged, and the reason to start on a demo is stronger than usual: nothing about how these instruments feel resembles a currency pair.

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