SEC Insider Trade Investigations Buoyed in Appeals Court Ruling

An appeals court decision reviving an SEC insider trading case removes what targets of such probes saw as a strike against investigations based on data analysis and other circumstantial evidence.

A Virginia federal district court had abruptly ended the trial of Christopher Clark, a mortgage broker accused of trading on illicit tips ahead of Gartner Inc.’s 2017 acquisition of CEB Inc. The court said the US Securities and Exchange Commission’s case was based on too much speculation.

The US Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit reversed that decision in a precedential ruling and said a jury should’ve decided the ...