Farting: Definition in Trading, How This Strategy Is Used, and Example
Farting
A trading strategy that releases a large stock position into the market in a single, forceful burst.
Key Takeaways
- Farting is an aggressive execution style in which a trader pushes an entire stock order into the market at once instead of breaking it into smaller pieces.
- Practitioners, known as farters, trade exclusively in equities and prioritize speed and certainty of fill over minimizing market impact.
- Because the full size hits the order book in one shot, the price moves visibly, often producing a sharp, sudden swing.
- The approach is the direct opposite of clipping — the practice of slicing a large order into many small fills to stay hidden.
- Farting incurs high slippage and signals intent to the rest of the market, so it is used only when getting fully in or out immediately is worth the cost.
Farting is a short-term equity trading strategy aimed at moving a full position into or out of a stock as quickly and completely as possible. Rather than feeding an order into the market gradually, a trader using this approach commits the entire size at once, accepting a large, immediate price impact in exchange for an instant, guaranteed fill.
The traders who work this way are called farters, and they deal strictly in stocks. Their defining trait is force: where most large orders are worked quietly to avoid disturbing the price, a farter does the opposite, hitting the order book hard enough that the move is impossible to miss. The strategy is legal and widely understood, but its bluntness makes it expensive and conspicuous.
How Farting Works in Trading
To understand farting, it helps to understand its opposite: clipping. When an institution needs to trade a large block, it usually clips the order — slicing it into dozens or hundreds of small child orders that are released over time so the market never sees the full size. The goal of clipping is stealth: get the position done at a price close to where the stock was trading before you started.
Farting abandons that discipline entirely. The farter submits the whole order as a single aggressive market or marketable-limit order, sweeping straight through the visible liquidity at the best price and into the levels behind it. The order doesn't tiptoe through the book — it blows through it. The result is a sudden, forceful price move and a fill that is complete in seconds rather than spread across a session.
Characteristics
Farting has a distinctive profile that separates it from worked or algorithmic execution:
- Single-shot execution. The full size is committed in one order, not metered out over time.
- High market impact. The order sweeps multiple price levels, so the stock moves noticeably as it fills.
- Large size relative to liquidity. The bigger the order is against the available volume, the louder the move.
- Visible footprint. The print is obvious on the tape; everyone watching the name sees it happen.
- Speed over stealth. Certainty and immediacy are prized; concealment is sacrificed entirely.
- Equities only. Farting is a stock-market practice; it relies on a centralized order book deep enough to absorb the hit.
Strategies
There is more than one situation that calls for farting. The common variants include:
The clean rip
The trader sweeps the full position at once, often at the open or on a liquidity spike, accepting the impact in return for being done instantly and moving on.
The forced exit
When a risk limit is breached or a position has to be flattened immediately — ahead of news, a margin call, or a stop-out — the farter blasts the entire size out of the market without working it, prioritizing being out over getting a good price.
The liquidity sweep
The trader deliberately overwhelms thin offers or bids to take everything available at once, used when grabbing all the size in a name matters more than the average price paid.
Example
Suppose a trader needs to exit 500,000 shares of a stock that is bid at $40.00. A patient desk would clip the order over the day and likely average near $39.95. The farter instead sends the full 500,000 as a single market order.
The order takes the entire bid at $40.00, then keeps filling into progressively lower bids — $39.95, $39.90, $39.80 — until the size is exhausted, landing an average price of roughly $39.70. That is about 25 cents per share worse than the worked execution, or near $125,000 in extra slippage. The farter pays that cost knowingly: in return, the entire position is gone in seconds, with zero exposure to where the stock trades for the rest of the day. That trade-off — certainty now, paid for in impact — is the whole point of the strategy.
FAQs
Is farting profitable?
Is farting legal?
What is the opposite of farting?
Why would anyone fart an order?
The Bottom Line
Farting is a blunt, high-impact equity execution style that commits a full position to the market in a single forceful burst rather than working it quietly. It trades a good average price for total certainty and speed, making the move loud, obvious, and expensive in slippage. It is the mirror image of clipping, and while it is rarely the cheapest way to trade, it is the fastest way to be completely in or out when that is all that matters.