“Democratic presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton released a plan Thursday to regulate Wall Street institutions by tackling excessive risk-taking and punishing bank executives.

“The headline-grabbing proposal was levying a tax on certain aspects of high-speed trading, sometimes called flash trading because it involves buying, selling and canceling orders that happen in fractions of a second. This algorithm-driven trading has led to some high-profile volatility in financial markets, and the growth of this kind of trading adds to the perception that there’s little place in the stock market for ordinary individual investors.

“High-frequency trading was the focus of the best-selling book Flash Boys by author Michael Lewis, who alleged that the speed of these traders pushes up the price of stocks and amounts to gaining at the expense of players like pension funds who invest the retirement assets of everyday Americans.

“Every presidential candidate needs to make not just Wall Street reform a priority but ending high-frequency trading a priority,” said Dennis Kelleher, who heads Better Markets, a group that advocates for great regulation of financial markets.”

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Read the full McClatchy Washington Bureau article by Kevin G. Hall and Anita Kumar here.