Best time to trade synthetic indices on Deriv

There is no best time of day to trade Deriv's synthetic indices. They run around the clock, weekends included, and they are generated to move the same way at 3 in the morning as at 3 in the afternoon. We checked 30 days of hourly data on Volatility 10, 75 and 100, and no hour stood out on all three. The best time to run a bot is when you can give the session your attention and set its limits before you press Run bot. The market and the bot you pick shape a session far more than the clock does.

Synthetic indices trading hours

Deriv offers "round-the-clock access to Synthetic Indices, including weekends and public holidays". They have no opening bell, no close and no weekend gap. Deriv generates them with "a cryptographically secure random number generator", and says they are "unaffected by real-world news or market volatility". So there is no news release to wait for, and no session overlap like the London and New York crossover in currency markets.

What 30 days of hourly data show

We pulled 720 one-hour candles, 30 days' worth, for each of Volatility 10, 75 and 100 from Deriv's own feed. For each hour we measured how far the price moved, high to low, as a share of the price, then averaged by hour of day.

Every hour on each index moved about as much as every other. Weekends moved the same as weekdays: 1.22% an hour on Volatility 75 at the weekend against 1.24% on weekdays, and 1.69% both ways on Volatility 100. And the busiest hour on one index was not the busiest on the next: 09:00 on Volatility 75, 17:00 on Volatility 10, 04:00 on Volatility 100. There is no shared busy hour to plan around, so the fixed "best GMT times" you may see for V75 do not show up in the data.

What shapes a session instead

The market. Each index has its own volatility, and that does not change with the hour. Volatility 10 moved about 0.17% an hour and Volatility 100 about 1.69%. That matters for Touch / No Touch and Higher / Lower bots, which need the price to travel a set distance. A Rise / Fall contract wins on any move in the right direction, and a digit bot's odds are the same on every index, so for those the market mostly changes how a session looks on the chart. The synthetic indices guide covers each family.

The tick speed. The standard indices tick every 2 seconds and the 1s indices every second. A 1s index gives a bot twice as many ticks in the same session, so a short session gets through more trades. The 1s indices guide compares them.

The bot's pace. On the Bots page, Quick entries bots trade often and Longer scans bots wait for a specific setup. A Quick entries bot suits a short session you watch from start to finish. A Longer scans bot suits a session you can leave open for a while.

The session limits. Take profit, Stop loss and Max losses in a row decide when a session ends, whatever the time. Set them to amounts that suit your balance before you start. The stop loss and take profit guide explains each one.

Picking your time

Run a session when you can keep the browser tab open until it finishes. A BinaryTick bot runs in your browser, so closing the tab or letting the phone lock for a long stretch stops new trades; the phone guide covers that. A short session with the run panel in view also shows you how the bot behaves, trade by trade.

If you trade digits, the last digit analysis guide shows the same thing for digit odds: no hour gives one digit an edge over another.

Run one now

Pick a time you have twenty minutes free, open the Bots page, and run a Quick entries bot on your demo balance with its default limits. Rise / Fall Momentum on Volatility 100 is a good first choice: it trades often, so a short session shows you plenty of contracts. Watch the session end on its own when it reaches one of its limits.