Every trade in the game so far has asked the same question: which way? You go LONG expecting a rise, SHORT expecting a fall. If you are right about direction you profit; if wrong, you lose. The payoff is linear — a 2% move twice as far pays twice as much.
The ⚡ VOL BET mechanic asks a different question entirely: how much? You are not predicting whether price goes up or down. You are predicting that it moves enough in either direction to clear a threshold. Being completely wrong about direction and still profiting is not a bug — it is the design.
Linear means your profit is proportional to the move. Price moves twice as far, you make twice as much. LONG and SHORT are linear. Plotted, the payoff is a diagonal line — losses in one direction, gains in the other, scaling smoothly throughout.
Convex means the relationship bends. A volatility bet has a V-shaped payoff:
That bend is convexity. You pay for it upfront as a premium. In exchange, direction stops mattering and magnitude starts mattering instead.
When you buy a put option — a contract giving you the right to sell at a fixed price — someone else sold it to you. That person is called the writer. They collected your premium and took on a legal obligation: if you exercise, they must buy your shares at the agreed price regardless of what the market says.
Why would anyone accept that? Because most options expire worthless. The writer is running an insurance business. You pay a small premium; in the years nothing burns down, the insurer keeps it. When the rare catastrophic event occurs, the insurer pays out — and absorbs that loss against all the premiums collected in calmer times. The writer is the insurance company. You are the homeowner buying fire cover.
The game's VOL BET simplifies this relationship into a single mechanic, but the asymmetry is the same: the cost is paid upfront and certain; the payout is contingent on something dramatic actually happening.
During a rumor telegraph — a CRASH WARNING or MOMENTUM SURGE — and only when you are not already holding a position, the ⚡ VOL BET button appears above the chart. It costs half your current stake.
After the rumor resolves (confirmed or debunked), the bet settles based on how far price actually moved, in either direction. The payout structure is a deliberate cliff:
| Move size (either direction) | Payout |
|---|---|
| Below 1.5% | 0× — expires worthless |
| At 1.5% | 1.1× premium (immediate small profit) |
| At ~8.2% | 6.0× premium (cap) |
| Above 8.2% | 6.0× premium (cap — no further scaling) |
There is no gradual break-even. You either miss the strike entirely and lose the full premium, or you clear it and immediately profit. The jump from zero to 1.1× at exactly 1.5% is intentional — it makes the mechanics legible.
A bet like this can easily become a money printer if priced carelessly — buy it every rumor and watch the balance compound. The game's mechanics were calibrated against 3,000 simulated rumor cycles from the actual engine before a line of UI was written.
The finding that shaped the design: post-shock moves are far smaller than intuition suggests. Median move: 1.42%. 90th percentile: 3.39%. That is why the strike sits at 1.5% — right at the median, so roughly half of bets pay, which feels fair, while the pricing ensures neither path prints.
| Strategy | Returns per bet | Pay rate |
|---|---|---|
| Buy on every telegraph, blindly | 0.919× premium | 47.2% |
| Buy only on a trusted REAL call | 0.992× premium | 49.9% |
Both are below 1.0×, which is the number that matters. Spamming it blindly bleeds you roughly 8% per bet. Even perfect knowledge of whether a rumor is genuine — from a high-accuracy influencer — only gets you to near break-even. Influencers make the bet playable; they do not make it a printer.
LONG and SHORT require two correct decisions: direction and timing. The VOL BET requires one: magnitude. That sounds easier, but it isn't — it's just different. The cases where it outperforms a directional trade are also the cases where you would have been right about one and wrong about the other.
The practical situations where a VOL BET is worth considering:
The game's mechanic is a stripped-down version of a straddle: buying a call and a put at the same strike simultaneously, so you profit if price moves substantially in either direction. It is one of the most common volatility trades around major announcements — earnings, central bank decisions, regulatory rulings — where direction is genuinely unknown but magnitude is expected to be large.
The cost is always the combined premium of both contracts. If nothing dramatic happens, you lose both. If something dramatic happens, one side pays and — if the move is large enough — more than covers the combined cost. The seller of both contracts is collecting premium and betting that the announcement lands without shock: the same insurance-company position the writer holds in any options trade.
Convexity is the general name for payoffs that accelerate rather than scale linearly. Any position where the upside is disproportionately larger than a proportionate move would predict — because the payoff curve bends in your favour — has positive convexity. Options are the clearest example, but the concept appears anywhere the payoff relationship bends rather than slopes.
Try the VOL BET in game →