This week, I made nearly 300 basis points in my trading account and I owe it all to Twitter. After ignoring the application for nearly a year, I finally discovered its full potential when my friend Todd Gordon introduced me to its power at the FX Street conference a few weeks ago in Barcelona.

For most of last year, I thought Twitter was basically just a method for fatuous teenagers to post their rambling updates about their latest mani-padi or a way for narcissistic celebrities to tell me all about their fabulous lives. (My favorite Twitter celebrity post was from Demi Moore, who informed her multitude of followers that she and Ashton broke their Yom Kippur fast at TGI Fridays. I am sure the rabbis would be enormously proud of their deep spirituality.)

Todd, however, showed me that Twitter can be used as a professional tool to keep in touch with currency traders throughout the global day. I watched what he and Asharf Laidi had done with their feeds and was instantly hooked. Before long, I started to tweet and without even noticing it, I managed to rack up nearly 300 posts in one week. It's been a true analytical challenge to react to the market in near real time and I have enjoyed every second of it, but I never expected the experience to improve my trading. And yet it did in a very big way.

Twitter, by making my thoughts public, forced me to become a much more selective trader. It eliminated my greatest trading flaw – the "what the heck trade." I am sure many of you are familiar with that phenomenon. You are bored, you are itchy, the markets are listless, so you put on a trade just for the heck of it.

I can’t begin to tell you the amount of pips I’ve lost to that little exercise over my lifetime. The irony is that up to this point nothing has ever worked to change my behavior. No pep talks, no hours of self flagellation, not even the prospect of burning cash in order to physically absorb the stupidity of my actions helped me to kick the bad habit. But the prospect of public humiliation worked wonders. My hedge fund friends all laughed at the idea that I needed Twitter to finally learn some discipline, calling me a hopeless exhibitionist. To that I plead guilty as charged, but the idea of accountability for your actions is one of the most important lessons we can learn as traders.

Ultimately, it’s not the market, the dealer, the newsflow or other traders that make us lose. It’s us. We are out own worst saboteurs. The sooner we learn that lesson the better traders we will become.

Oh and one more thing. You know how we are always taught to keep a trading diary? And you know how 95% of us (yours truly amongst them) never do that? Well, by tweeting you naturally create a trading diary as part of the process. And since the software saves all your posts you can easily analyze them at your leisure to see what mistakes you made. So better late than ever, I’ve become a member of Twitter nation and I suggest you do the same. Your trading account will thank you.

Boris Schlossberg serves as director of currency research at GFT, and runs bktraderfx.com.