A bankruptcy judge yesterday upheld a trustee’s method of adjudicating the claims of investors who fell prey to Bernard L. Madoff’s massive Ponzi scheme.

Under Trustee Irving H. Picard’s “cash-in/cash out” approach, investors who withdrew more money from their Madoff accounts than they deposited (“net winners”) will not be compensated while investors who withdrew less than they put in (“net losers”) would be compensated by the Securities Investor Protection Corp. (SIPC).