No trader ever filed a ticket saying "your latency is 400 milliseconds too high." What they say is that the platform feels sluggish, that prices seem behind, that the fill was not the price on the screen — and then they say nothing at all, because they have moved to a competitor. Latency is the feature nobody names and everybody feels, and for a trading firm it quietly shapes trust, volume and churn.
For an operator choosing infrastructure, latency is also widely misunderstood — treated as a single number when it is actually a chain of them. This article walks the chain link by link, and shows how eTrader engineers each one, from a 70ms-updated feed to a global network that routes every trader to the nearest point of presence.
Why Milliseconds Move Your Business
Retail traders are not high-frequency funds, so why care? Three commercial reasons. Trust: when a trader's price ticks visibly behind a reference chart on their second screen, they conclude the platform — and by extension your firm — is slow or worse. Execution disputes: the bigger the gap between displayed and executed price, the more "that's not the price I clicked" tickets your support desk eats. Activity: a terminal that responds instantly invites interaction; one that hesitates gets checked less and traded less. For prop firms there is a fourth: evaluation traders comparing firms discuss platform feel constantly in public communities, and "laggy" is a review you cannot delete.
The Latency Chain, Link by Link
What a trader experiences as "speed" is the sum of distinct delays:
- Feed latency — how fresh the price is when it reaches the platform. eTrader's included data feed updates every 70 milliseconds, faster than human reaction time, so the chart is effectively live to the eye.
- Distribution latency — how far that price travels to the trader's screen. This is where geography dominates: a server on one continent serving a trader on another adds an unavoidable round-trip on every tick and every order.
- Execution latency — how fast an order is accepted and filled. On eTrader, orders execute in milliseconds.
- Interface latency — how fast the terminal itself renders. A fast feed drawn by a slow legacy UI still feels slow; eTrader's web-native terminal was built this decade for exactly this.
Vendors love to quote one flattering link of this chain. Traders experience the whole chain. Evaluate accordingly.
Geography Is Half the Battle: nearest-PoP Routing
The most common latency mistake firms make is architectural: hosting a platform in one region and selling worldwide. Physics does not negotiate — every thousand kilometers adds delay, and a single-region deployment means your London traders and your Kuala Lumpur traders live on different platforms in practice. eTrader's answer is an interconnected global network that routes every trader to the nearest point of presence. A trader in Asia connects to Asia; a trader in the Americas connects to the Americas; prices stream live to both. The result is a platform that feels equally fast in Asia, Europe, the Americas and the Middle East — which matters enormously for prop firms and brokers whose acquisition is global by default, with affiliates and ad campaigns pulling traders from every timezone. The infrastructure behind this — hundreds of clustered servers you never operate — is detailed in hundreds of servers, none of them yours.
Vendor question that separates marketing from engineering: "Where are your points of presence, and what does a trader in Jakarta experience versus one in Frankfurt?" A single-region vendor will change the subject.
A 70Ms Feed — Included, Not Invoiced
Here is the part operators feel in the budget rather than the terminal: fast market data is traditionally a separate procurement. You source a feed vendor, negotiate redistribution, and pay every month — before a single trade. eTrader includes its 70ms-updated feed free to use, streaming into the platform and your portals from day one, with no separate data contract to source, negotiate or renew. Firms that want their own sources can plug them in per instrument through the eTrader Broker dashboard — included never means locked in. The economics of the data-feed market, and why this inclusion is such an anomaly, are covered in market data feeds explained.
Speed Under Load: Clusters, Not a Server
Latency claims are easy in quiet markets; they are proven during payrolls announcements and central-bank minutes, when every trader is watching and trading at once. A single-server deployment degrades exactly when speed matters most. eTrader runs on hundreds of servers arranged in clusters — load spreads across nodes, and if one has a problem another takes over while traders keep trading. Because the platform is fully managed, capacity planning, monitoring and scaling are Singuard's job, not a task for a tech team you would otherwise have to hire.
What This Costs You: Nothing Extra
The striking thing about global low-latency infrastructure is who normally affords it: top-tier brokers with in-house engineering. Through eTrader, the same architecture — 70ms feed, nearest-PoP routing, clustered failover — is simply what the platform runs on, at one predictable price from $6,600/month for brokers and $3,300/month for prop firms plus a one-time setup fee ($3,300 for brokers, $1,650 for prop firms) and a $1.50 per-account fee. It ships inside the Broker CRM and Prop Firm CRM bundles, connected in one click. Feel the responsiveness yourself at etraderweb.com — from wherever in the world you happen to be reading this.
"Latency is a fairness issue: a trader in Singapore deserves the same fill as one in London. Global points of presence make speed a right, not a region."
— Alex Onta, Executive Director, eTrader & Prop Firm CRM
Key Takeaways
- Latency is a chain — feed, distribution, execution, interface — and traders experience the whole chain, not the link a vendor quotes.
- Geography dominates: nearest-PoP routing is what makes a platform fast in Asia, Europe, the Americas and the Middle East at once.
- eTrader's 70ms-updated feed is included free — no separate data contract — with your own sources pluggable per instrument.
- Clustered servers keep speed and uptime through news spikes — and the whole stack is managed for you.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is 70Ms Fast Enough for Retail and Prop Trading?
Yes — 70 milliseconds is several times faster than human reaction time, so charts and quotes are effectively live for discretionary trading. Combined with millisecond order execution and nearest-PoP routing, the platform feels instant in normal use.
Can We Use Our Own Data Sources Instead of the Included Feed?
Yes. The 70ms feed is included free, and you can plug in your own sources managed per instrument from the eTrader Broker dashboard — see the data feed is included for how firms combine both.
Does My Firm Need to Deploy Anything Regionally?
No. The global network, points of presence and clustering are part of the managed platform — you host nothing, and traders are routed to the nearest PoP automatically wherever your marketing reaches.