Updated, 7:49 p.m. | Standing outside a Manhattan federal court on Friday, Nelson Obus put on his victory tie.
A jury of five men and five women had just cleared him of insider trading accusations, which Mr. Obus, a 67-year-old hedge fund manager, had spent more than 10 years and $9 million battling in court. The bright red tie, he had told his lawyers earlier in the day, was for his “win.”
The outspoken Mr. Obus, who earlier in the day wore striped socks, a light gray suit and a dark blue tie with pictures of constellations, breathed a loud sigh of relief as the decision was read. His wife, Eve Coulson, sat stone-faced behind him.
Mr. Obus’s anger at the Securities and Exchange Commission, which first filed suit against him in 2006, soon became apparent.
“If you had been doing your job this never would have happened,” Mr. Obus yelled at the S.E.C.’s lawyers even as his representatives tried to quiet him. “I’ve had my whole life wrapped up in this.”
An S.E.C. spokesman, John Nester, said, “Although we are disappointed, we respect the jury’s verdict.”
The jury also cleared one of Mr. Obus’s employees and a former underwriter at General Electric, concluding that they had not provided Mr. Obus with nonpublic information about the 2001 sale of SunSource, a seller of industrial products based in Philadelphia.
The decision represents the end of an extraordinarily long-running insider trading case. The S.E.C. first subpoenaed Mr. Obus in 2002 and filed a formal complaint nearly five years later, one month shy of the statute of limitations. Only one of the S.E.C.’s lawyers present on Friday worked on the case in 2006.
Clearly emotional, Mr. Obus read a long prepared statement outside the courtroom, at times veering off script to talk about his childhood and his father, a retail stockbroker whom Mr. Obus said had never had a run-in with the law.
“I know somewhere up there my father’s smiling today,” Mr. Obus told reporters.
Mr. Obus also called the S.E.C.’s lawsuit a “12-year campaign of regulatory overreach” and thanked the investors who had stuck with his firm, Wynnefield Partners, throughout the years. Seven percent of investors withdrew their money from Wynnefield because of the insider trading case, Mr. Obus said.
“We need to assure the business community that regulators can’t wrongly force small enterprises to settle, or falsely admit guilt,” Mr. Obus said.
This is the second prominent defeat for the S.E.C. in an insider trading trial in the last year. Last October, a federal jury in Dallas found Mark Cuban, the billionaire owner of the Dallas Mavericks basketball team, not liable of insider trading in another drawn-out legal battle.
The S.E.C. accused Mr. Obus of using an insider tip to buy stock in SunSource weeks ahead of its sale to Allied Capital, a trade that earned him a $1.3 million profit. The S.E.C. contended that Thomas B. Strickland, who worked at G.E., tipped his friend Peter F. Black, who worked for Mr. Obus’s firm, about the impending deal.
Mr. Black’s mother was present throughout the trial and held her face in her hand when the decision was read as she fought back tears.
Mr. Obus could have settled the case years ago but chose instead to fight to prove his innocence. A federal judge, George B. Daniels, even sided with Mr. Obus in 2010, ruling that the S.E.C. had failed to prove that there was sufficient evidence of insider trading, but the government won on appeal two years later. Judge Daniels presided over Mr. Obus’s trial.
“The only reason they did this is because they didn’t think we could win,” Mr. Obus said as people began filing out of the courtroom.
Mr. Obus has never looked or acted like a typical Wall Street insider. His appearance leans more toward disheveled than polished, and on Friday his belt was repeatedly unbuckled as he came in and out of the courtroom. During the trial, he testified that Wynnefield’s New York office had not changed its furniture since the company was founded in 1992.
On Friday, Mr. Obus came prepared for victory, showing off the bright red “win tie” he changed into soon after the jury’s decision was read.