By Perrie Weiner, Edward Totino and Aaron Goodman ( October 15, 2018, 2:47 PM EDT) -- It may look like a duck, walk like a duck and quack like a duck, but unless it actually is a duck, "mere suspicion" is not enough. The same is true of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission's burden in an insider trading case. Suspicious trades are not enough — that was the recent ruling by the U.S. District Court for the District of New Jersey in the SEC's enforcement action brought against traders in the securities of Fortress Investment Group LLC.[1] To profit in securities trading, it's helpful to have your finger on the pulse of the market and guess right. Ironically, invest too wisely, or guess too right, or simply get lucky, and you may just get an SEC subpoena. Even an astute trader may have many misses along the way, but one home run hunch on a pre-acquisition investment that looks too good to be true could buy the trader an SEC investigation, and maybe even an enforcement action. Such traders could be faced with the difficult task of proving a negative — that they were not tipped on material nonpublic inside information, but, instead, pieced together publicly available information to make a successful investment. But, that may be changing as some courts are finding that to support an enforcement action, the SEC is required to go beyond mere suspicion and identify the alleged tipper, and at least some information tying the trader to the tipper, rather than rely on mere suspicion and belief....