Every fill in the log carries a latency written as separate numbers — 4ms + 71ms — because it is different things added together, and adding them hid which one was which.
The first number
Tradeus, and only Tradeus: reading the payload, checking the passphrase, finding the strategy, sizing the position, checking that the account is not locked. Our own arithmetic, usually single digits.
The middle number
Shown as “wait”, and only when there was one. Brokers cap how often they may be asked anything, and the caps come in two shapes: a minimum gap between requests (one position read per second is common), or a budget inside a window — ten a second, where asking three things at once is fine. Where a gap applies, the second question has to queue. The time is spent on their rule, but the queue is ours, which makes this the one number here we can shorten without asking anyone.
The last number
Your broker. Everything that went over the wire: the order itself, and what we had to ask them before sending it — what you already hold, what the instrument’s tick and lot size are, what they call your symbol. Most of it is distance: light in fibre covers about 100 km per millisecond of round trip, so a broker on another continent costs over a hundred milliseconds before anyone has done any work.
Why not one number
The single figure was read as our speed and never was. Split, a slow trade tells you where to look: a large first number is ours to answer for, a large middle one is a rate limit being obeyed, and a large last one is the wire and the broker. Fills from before 24 September 2026 carry a first number that still included the questions we asked your broker before the order — so an old row may look slower on our side than the same trade would today.
A dash in the second place (4ms + —) means the broker never told us how long it took. A single number on its own is a fill from before this split existed.
Occasionally a row says attempts as well. That means the first order was refused and Tradeus asked again. The wait between the tries belongs to neither half, so it is named rather than folded into one of them.
What single-digit end-to-end would take
Nobody reaches a broker in ten milliseconds over the public internet unless the server sits in the same building as the broker's matching engine. Anyone advertising that number is quoting their own processing — the first of these two — without the second beside it.