Been trading now for a little over two years and I am just now at a place where I am comfortable risking 1% to try and make 2%. Most of the time, though, I'm only making between 1-1.5%. The biggest thing for me was overcoming my tendency to overtrade if I wasn't reaching my profit target. Many times I'd be up and give it all back because I hadn't yet reached my target. I've now limited myself to one trade max per day. I know that's probably not preferable to you (and most) but I've found that it really helps me to be much more selective with the trades I take. I also only trade 1-5min ORB's and nothing else. If I don't see a trade 10-15min after the open, I shut everything down and walk away. But it has taken me two years to get to this point of knowing myself (i.e., what works and what doesn't in terms of my personal trading psychology). So you just have to put your time in and try to find your niche. Try not to get overwhelmed by all the info, strategies, ect. out there. Just focus on one thing at a time.

This is a great question. I had the same experience of doing well early and then having more problems later. I am a very curious person and I am a trier. Once I know something can be done I will never give up. This sounds great for trading right? It is, but also it means that I just keep trying things when I should give up and focus on one thing! So I tried opening range brakes, I tried reversals, I tried momentum trading, I tried trend trading, I tried scalping, I tried it all! I tried going live after 6 months in the simulator and it was a total disaster. I reacted emotionally after a big loss and tried to make all my money back on the next trade and lost twice as much. So I went back into the simulator and then I tried going live again a few months later and it was better but still not good. Then I mostly traded in the sim and sometimes when things were going well I did some live trades but I knew that I wasn't there yet. I finally got to the point where I had come full circle. I had tried all the different things I was going to try and I was starting to look back at what had worked best for me and came up with what I really wanted to stick to. For me it was a matter of keeping things very simple and doing very few trades. I decided to do one five-minute ORB. No trading in the first 5 minutes! Had to wait for that first 5-minute candle that close and then look for an entry. Then I would do one VWAP break, usually after 9:45 or so, and only enter on volume. I would not do any trading after 10 am. Working this plan really helped me in a few ways. First, if I had a down day it would be a small down day. Things can only go so badly when you just do two trades. Also, this kept the fees down. So once I could do that consistently and I was getting decent results and, most importantly, it just felt like a normal thing everyday, I went live again and have been live since then. That point of going live was after a year and a half of trading the open before my job of running my small business every day so it took a while! I track my 10 and 20 day averages, focusing on R multiples not money, increasing my risk when my 20 day average is above .5R and now sometimes do another one or two trades and sometimes trade a bit after 10am. So anyway, finally deciding on two simple trades to focus on was what did it for me. And doing just one ORB and then waiting for a volume entry on the 2 min. chart for a VWAP break kept me from making entries based on reactions instead of rules.