Every trade generates a tick: a price, a volume, a timestamp. An active stock might generate thousands of ticks per second. Distributing that data to thousands of subscribers simultaneously is its own problem. What Tick Data Looks Like A tick is small: instrument ID, price, quantity, timestamp. The volume is the problem. During market open or a news event, tick rates spike dramatically. Subscribers range from high-frequency algorithms (latency-sensitive, need every tick) to dashboards (showing “current price,” don’t care about ticks they missed).