WASHINGTON — The Securities and Exchange Commission clarified Thursday that insider trading will henceforth be prosecuted only when the trader demonstrably "sucks at it," formalizing a policy that market participants described as a long-overdue codification of reality.

The updated enforcement manual defines prosecutable trades as those where the defendant "failed to clear a basic profit threshold or, worse, lost money despite possessing material non-public information." Trades netting over $2 million in illegal gains will be reclassified as "market intuition" and allowed to stand, provided the offender had a Bloomberg Terminal and projected confidence.

"We can't police every congressman who beats the S&P 500 by forty points," said SEC Enforcement Director Marcus Lin in a briefing. "But the guy who got a hot tip on a merger and still panic-sold at a loss? That's a crime we can prove to a jury, because the jury will be offended by the incompetence."

The policy has already drawn praise from institutional investors, several U.S. senators, and anyone who understands that the real crime on Wall Street has never been cheating, but being gauche enough to get caught doing it poorly.