KX Capital Markets Summit 2025

Returns and volatility: Is it correlation, causation, or coincidental?

At the KX Capital Markets Summit in NYC, Judith Gu, Head of Equities and FX Quant Trading Strategies at Scotiabank, unpacked one of the most persistent and misunderstood questions in high-frequency trading: What is the true relationship between returns and volatility — and why do our models often fail to capture it?

At the KX Capital Markets Summit in NYC, Judith Gu, Head of Equities and FX Quant Trading Strategies at Scotiabank, unpacked one of the most persistent and misunderstood questions in high-frequency trading: What is the true relationship between returns and volatility — and why do our models often fail to capture it?

Drawing on her transition from equities into the much faster, noisier world of FX, Judith explored how assumptions that hold in traditional markets quickly break down in a domain where microstructure noise, 24-hour liquidity cycles, and millisecond-level reactions to macro events reshape the behavior of price data itself.

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