To me, absolutely everything you’ve said above sounds extremely sensible, and a really good and commendable approach.
“Up to 5%” is disastrously big, and up to 10% unimaginable.
I’ll try to explain why, so that 1% or 2% position-sizes [I][U]don’t[/U][/I] seem ridiculous to you, but utlimately a solid explanation from a beginner’s textbook is probably going to make a lot more sense and be a lot more coherently and logically and systematically explained than any ultra-brief “forum explanations” of the subject, and in this context I’s strongly recommend both Van K. Tharp’s [I]Trade Your Way to Financial Freedom[/I] and Michael Harris’s [I]Profitability and Systematic Trading[/I].
Here’s the thing: if you’re trading with a 2:1 reward-to-risk ratio (and there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that, at all), then look at it this way - if you had no skill at all, and effectively all your trade outcomes were “random”, you’d expect to win about one third of your trades and lose two thirds. That gives you an “expected win-rate” (without allowing for any skill and without allowing for any good luck) of 33%. We both you’ll hope you’ll do slightly better, of course, but one has to allow for bad times, and if you actually [U]have[/U] a win-rate of 33%, then it’s almost a certainty that eventually you’re going to hit a losing run of 20+ trades [U]without doing anything wrong at all[/U], just because that’s a [B]normal statistical expectation[/B].
And (more importantly) it’s something between [U]five and ten times[/U] as likely as that, that at some point you’ll have a “long, bad [I]patch[/I]” of which the net financial outcome is equivalent to a losing run of 20+, even if the actual “consecutive losing run” is a lot shorter than that.
All those times that you’re a bit unlucky and lose three or four trades in a row, then have one winner, then lose another three or four in a row: you don’t have to have many of those to hit a bad patch which is financially equivalent in its outcome to 20 consecutive losers. If you’re using 5% position-sizing, that’s going to kill your balance, and it’s probably going to happen sooner rather than later.
From what you’ve said above, I think you should probably be using [B]1%[/B] position-sizes.
And if you go above 2%, you’re really gambling with it … and that would be a great shame, given that everything else you said, at the start of your post, sounds [B][U]so[/U][/B] well thought-out and reasonable and promising!
This is a subject which is really [I]terribly counter-intuitive[/I], so let me say again that reading the books I’ve mentioned above would be hugely helpful to you, because inevitably they explain it far better than I (or anyone else here) realistically can, in a forum post.
And good luck!