The Edge-Computing Quote Path: Where to Put the Fan-Out

Not financial advice. Verify claims independently.

Geography is latency. Where the fan-out layer physically runs decides the tail.

The unsexy truth about real-time market data: the biggest latency component isn't code — it's distance.

Co-located ingest (exchange-adjacent): the first hop is physics-fixed, ~5ms
Regional fan-out (us-east/us-west/eu): the second hop is controllable
Last-mile to device (mobile): the third hop is uncontrollable — you can only minimize hops before it

The architecture that wins: ingest in the exchange's region, fan-out in the client's region. Stock Picks's deployment puts the pub/sub sidecar in the same VPC as the app servers — the quote path is region-internal until the final hop to your phone.

Latency dashboards live on the site — the regional breakdown is the interesting part.