Well, please excuse the observation (offered with no malice at all) that the people here who are making a steady living from our trading might be a little more forthcoming with assistance/comments/advice to you if you’d been a little less dismissive and critical of input in some other discussions here. Nevertheless, I’ll try to help, if I can …
That’s inevitably what will tend to happen, if you start trading systems/methods that aren’t fully researched and proven to have an edge [I][U]before[/U][/I] you start putting money on them.
For most of the last 4/4.5 years, my vague mental target has been to average out at around 6.0-6.5% per month, managing risk at tightly as I can and never exposing more than 1% of my account (including times of having more than one trade open) to risk at any one time.
However, in December 2015, in response to repeated advice from institutional and ex-institutional trader friends, I made a change to the charts I was using (which actually also meant switching from spot forex to futures, because I now use constant-volume bars, which aren’t available for spot forex), and without changing anything else much, about my basic trading methods and systems, that’s taken me up to 9.0-11.0% per month ever since, otherwise doing exactly the same things I’ve been doing for years. I’m so conservative, risk-averse and cautious that I still wouldn’t go so far as to say that that’s become a specific “monthly target” for me, though. I think the key point is that as long as you use only methods which you’ve [I]proven, yourself, to have a positive net expectation[/I] exactly as you’re trading them, using appropriate position-sizing and risk-limitation, you’re extremely unlikely to come to any harm, anyway … which is what matters, in the long run.
Expectation and targets are fine (to varying extents for different personality-types, I think), but what actually matters to me, when I sit down at 9.00 every morning to begin the day’s trading, isn’t “to make money on the day”: it’s “to be able to sit down again at 9.00 the next morning and begin another day’s trading” … because I [B][U]know[/U][/B] that if I can do that steadily, using a system/method with a genuine, proven edge, I’m going to make a good living in the long run - and “the long run” is all that matters, in this business. Nothing boosts confidence as much as trading in a way which you already know is profitable, before you put your money down. The problems, disillusionment, and switching tack from one thing to another typically arise when people seek short-cuts (some of them imagining that if they “just copy something that ‘works’,” they’ll be able to bypass most of the actually-required education and experience phases which all of us making a living needed).
For me, it’s very much price action (and indicator-dependency-avoidance!). I look at price action methods as the ones that have reliably stood the test of time, changing markets, and so on. Countless others have made very good livings from them, and so can I. So far, anyway. But “so far” is getting me quite a long way, now, over the years.
So I use methods that I’ve learned from standard, accredited, authoritative textbooks (not “online information”) written by Joe Ross, Al Brooks, Bob Volman and others. Together with having had a long education in the relevant maths/statistics/probability that we all need, sooner or later, to be able to make a living in this game.
I trade only simple, straightforward, price action set-ups, when they arise. I don’t do anything very difficult or particularly complicated: I just do simple things very well and very consistently and very repeatedly. (I have 5 different “systems”, in my routine trading, 3 of which have broad similarities and all 5 of which are predicated on the same principles of entering markets which are resuming former trends after corrections/retracements/consolidations - and I trade them from fast-moving charts, so that in statistical terms my “sample size” of trades is always relatively high and the luck therefore evens out pretty quickly, in other words “avoiding bad losing runs”. It’s a method that suits active traders with time to spend in front of charts, and plenty of patience and discipline: aspiring traders usually greatly overestimate what they can legitimately expect to achieve quickly while also seriously and significantly underestimating what they can achieve gradually; but as mentioned above, everything starts from methods that have a [I][U]proven[/U][/I] edge.)
The five big “mistakes to avoid”, from my perspective, are set out here.