Over under digit contracts and the cards that matter

Over under digit contracts ask one question about the last digit of the next tick: will it land above a barrier you choose, or below it. You pick a market, you pick a number from 0 to 9, and you pick over or under. The tick arrives, the last digit is read, and the contract is settled. This post explains how that works on Deriv and which cards on the BancaBot digit analyzer screen are worth reading before you place one.

Over and under split the ten digits into two groups

Every tick price ends in a digit from 0 to 9. An over contract with barrier 4 wins when the last digit is 5, 6, 7, 8 or 9. An under contract with barrier 4 wins when the digit is 0, 1, 2 or 3. The barrier digit itself is not in either group, which is the part that catches people out. On an over 4 contract, a tick ending in 4 does not win.

That means the barrier you choose decides how wide your group is. Over 0 covers nine digits out of ten. Over 8 covers one, the digit 9. Under 1 covers only the digit 0. The wider the group, the more often it should land, and the payout Deriv shows on the screen moves the other way. You can see this yourself by changing the barrier on Deriv's contract panel and watching the quoted payout change before you buy anything.

So over under digit contracts are not really a market call. They are a call about the shape of the last digit distribution, and about how much of that distribution you are willing to buy.

The digit share card is the one to read first

The digit analyzer counts the last digit of each tick over a window and shows the share each digit took. That single card tells you most of what an over or under contract cares about, because you can add the shares on either side of your barrier and see what the recent window actually did.

Here is a real window. Taken from Deriv's live feed at 2026-09-29 15:04 UTC, the last 1000 ticks of Volatility 10 Index from 14:31 to 15:04 UTC gave these shares: 0 at 10.4%, 1 at 12%, 2 at 11.4%, 3 at 10.2%, 4 at 10.3%, 5 at 10.4%, 6 at 10.5%, 7 at 7.7%, 8 at 8.1%, 9 at 9%. The most common digit was 1, the least common was 7, and the spread between them was 4.3 points.

Read that as a group and the picture changes. Digits 0 through 4 took 54.3% of that window. Digits 5 through 9 took 45.7%. In the same window on Volatility 25 Index, the low half was softer: 0 at 10.4%, 1 at 10.2%, 2 at 10.3%, 3 at 8.3%, 4 at 8.8%, with 9 the most common digit at 11.4% and 3 the least at 8.3%. Two markets, the same half hour, tilted in opposite directions.

A past window is a description, not a forecast

None of that says what the next tick will do. A thousand ticks is a small sample and these are synthetic indices, so a digit that has been quiet for half an hour is under no obligation to catch up. The spread card makes this easier to keep in mind. On Volatility 75 Index in the same window the spread was 2.6 points, on Volatility 100 Index 2.8 points, on Volatility 50 Index 2.8 points. A flat spread means the window is close to even and there is not much for an over or under call to lean on.

Most people who trade digit contracts lose money. The analyzer does not change that. It changes how much of the picture you can see before you decide, and it lets you tell a genuinely lopsided window apart from one that only looks lopsided because you were watching the last five ticks.

The cards that matter and the ones that do not

Different digit contracts care about different cards. For over under digit contracts, this is roughly the order of usefulness:

• Digit share. The core card. Sum the shares on your side of the barrier.
• Most and least common digit. Useful for spotting which end of the range is currently heavy, which is the end an over or under barrier sits against.
• Spread. The gap between the busiest and quietest digit, in points. A narrow spread means a near even window.
• Tick window and time. Always check what period the counts cover, because a card with no timestamp is a card you cannot judge.

The direction cards matter less here. Price on Volatility 50 Index was down 0.562% over that window and Volatility 10 Index was up 0.110%, but a last digit does not follow the trend. The longest run of ticks in one direction, 9 on Volatility 10 Index and 8 on Volatility 25 Index, belongs to rise and fall thinking, not to digit barriers. Read those cards for the market's mood, not for your barrier.

The analyzer shows one pick and the reasoning under it

The Deriv analyzer reads the last digits of Deriv's synthetic indices and shows one pick for the next tick, with every card that led to it shown underneath. You can disagree with the pick and still use the cards. That is the point of showing them.

Signing in is through Deriv's own OAuth screen with your own Deriv account. The permission asked for is trading only, which lets BancaBot read the balance and place trades. It cannot withdraw and never sees your password. Real and demo accounts both work, and a demo account is the sensible place to try a barrier for the first time, because it costs nothing to find out that over 8 is a narrow door.

Open the digit analyzer on a demo account, pick one market, and watch the digit share card for a while before you place anything.