He is teaching marketing.

That is how I ended the disclosure I gave in the first hour of the financial engineering course I teach at Yerevan State University.

The disclosure was about me.

I run a company that builds trading systems for clients. That gives me real data, real infrastructure and real failures, and I use all of them in the course, the failures included. It also gives me a bias. I have a professional interest in believing that this field works.

So when our own results come back negative, the negative result is the one I show.

The disclosure is the easy part.

If I say something and you cannot tell whether it is a theorem, a published finding or my own experience, stop me and ask which one it is. That is not rudeness in this course. That is the course.

When I am giving an opinion rather than a result, I say so, and I ask the room to hold me to it.

If somebody hands you a result and asks whether it can be trusted, sorting the claim into one of those three is most of the work.

A conflict you declare before anyone asks is a small thing. The same one, found later, is not.

The document that holds me to it is the syllabus, filed with the university in Armenian and English in September. Write to me at robert_yenokyan@bonton.ai and I will send you the English one.

The other half of that disclosure is that the failures are course material, so the negative results from our own work get taught as examples rather than left out of the story.