Margin Call · story

Inside the Absurd 'FART' Stock Strategy Sweeping Internet Traders

A rogue retail investor claims counting the word 'AI' on corporate homepages unlocked massive portfolio returns—and now he's warning of a market crash.
By Grant and Vale July 25, 2026 · 4:00pm UTC
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In the hyper-volatile world of retail stock trading, traditional metrics like price-to-earnings ratios and discounted cash flows are increasingly being discarded in favor of far more unhinged indicators. Enter the Frequency AI Ratio Tracker—dubbed the "FART" strategy—a novel framework that measures corporate buzzword saturation to dictate market bets.

The creator of the framework, a self-described non-tech investor who claims to know nothing about artificial intelligence, spent the last three years executing a straightforward strategy: buying shares in any company the moment it tacked "AI" onto its corporate branding. From semiconductor giants to legacy hardware manufacturers, the approach yielded massive paper gains as corporate America scrambled to ride the generative tech wave.

To standardise the madness, the trader developed a quantitative metric by manually copy-pasting corporate homepage text into Microsoft Word and calculating the exact ratio of the word "AI" against total word count. The results were startling. Advanced Micro Devices led the pack with a staggering 6.85 percent score—meaning one out of every fifteen words on its homepage was "AI." Microchip heavyweights like Nvidia and cloud software providers like ServiceNow followed closely behind with elevated percentages.

For years, a high score was treated as an unassailable buy signal. But now, the creator warns that the tide has dramatically turned. Citing striking similarities to the dot-com bubble of the late 1990s—where legacy companies hyper-inflated their valuations simply by adding ".com" to their brand names—the trader has flipped the script, pioneering the "Reverse-FART" strategy.

Under this inverted system, high scores no longer signify easy profits; they represent extreme downfall risk. The trader argues that when corporate hype reaches critical mass, an explosive market correction becomes inevitable, making high-density tech homepages prime targets for short positions.

The viral methodology has sent shockwaves through online trading circles, igniting a fiery debate over whether the formula is secret financial genius or absolute delusion.

Supporters argue that tracking corporate word salad is actually a legitimate method for measuring peak market sentiment. One commenter noted that linguistic density is historically one of the cleanest indicators of corporate desperation, praising the strategy as elite timing for identifying market tops. Another observer joked that the reverse metric might finally serve as the ultimate tool to help struggling day traders recover lost principal capital.

However, skeptics are fiercely ringing the alarm bells. Skeptical market watchers cautioned against taking short bets against trillion-dollar tech leaders based on manual text counting in a word processor. One commenter pointedly warned that holding onto a FART position for too long almost always leads to a catastrophic mess, while another joked that switching from long bets to short positions simply converts the strategy into a SHART—or Short AI Ratio Tracker.

Whether the index proves to be a visionary sentiment tool or a fast track to personal bankruptcy remains to be seen as tech earnings approach.

Our hosts take a hilarious and intense look into this bizarre market indicator and decide whether it is pure financial alpha or total madness on the latest episode of the podcast.

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