I have a feeling most profitable traders are actually one trick ponies - they focus on one thing and do it particularly well, is there a need to learn another trick?

Not following what you are doing closely but my best insights below

Trade Frequency, Expectancy, Profit Factor, Net Profit, and Trade Quality Considerations
Profit factor and R (as in reward multiples) is associated with trade quality. Increasing trade selectivity will tend to produce higher quality trades at cost of net profit because of selectivity. In order to generate the same degree of profit with fewer trades compared to more trades, you need to risk more per trade. There is an important trade off here that needs to be understood. As you increase your trade selectivity to get better trades, you are decreasing your total number of trades and thus concentrating risk. As you decrease your trade selectivity to risk less per trade, you are decreasing the quality of the trade and the certainty that you are trading with an edge. The factors of trading cost, capital, and uncertainty are the relevant variables.

Taking fewer trades over some interval, at least for an algorithm, is more likely to be correlated with trading higher quality trade as there is greater ability to implement selectivity based on function of trade of quality. Discretionary traders tend to benefit from seeing more opportunities because it helps with the feedback process.

You may find that being more selective, i.e. risk averse, in your trading opportunities but then allowing those opportunities adequate space works best. Even, if you are trading selectively, if you have higher market cognition and creativity then you should be able to find more opportunities. "Not liking heat", same here at times, but it is also typically a product of lack of confidence in methods or lack of knowledge of how much heat a trade should take.

Generalization vs Specialization
Experience often translates to generalized ability which translates to robustness and ability to find opportunity within certain considerations at medium leverage. I am not sure it translates to being able to scale up in the way you want. Cost/benefit to specialization, the benefit is ability to obtain higher returns but the cost is fragility when market changes. I am taking to the view of trading plans as "projects" vs. "generalization".

Regarding your focus
I am unsure of the benefit of trying to extrapolate from small sets of data. I think what may help is to focus on the variants and invariants in your trading method. There is reproducible input and reproducible output. Reproducible input means being able to trade in a consistent way but doesn't guarantee reproducible output. The other way is to focus on reproducible output. Reproducible output, always unknown, but might be expressed by seeking the best opportunity set.

Yes, very possibly but this wasn't the primary point. But, it is likely there is a trade off between consistency and robustness. There are a couple ways to think about it. The markets are very efficient and so they tend to "punish" optimization. One way to think about it is that if you achieve the ability to trade with say a tight X tick stop loss then your precision is must be Z or better. Another way to think about it, let us imagine your edge is such that you risk 1 tick and have a 4 tick profit. The other way to think is how it becomes easier to game, i.e. you are taking from the best traders and you can only take provided you stay ahead of them. This is a more fundamental problem in that it is not the lack of an edge that gets most traders: it is not knowing their precision. If you have a larger account and reduce your leverage, you can achieve better returns without risking an error in precision and you can do so with less risk of changes in your precision.

Here is another way to think about it, if you are trading in a more general way with less leverage then when the market changes the degree to which you adapt is less. So your performance over the entire year might be less variable even if your "consistency" is worse. On the other hand, if you achieve high levels of consistency then when the market changes, you are more likely to have to make big changes which means higher variability which means requirement to go back simulator or have to wait or take steeper drawdowns-- so over the year you will have bigger periods of out performance.



My only suggestion is that if you are trying to scale up and this was maybe already obvious to you then a specific edge will be more important (then a generalized trading ability). If you do not have a very specific edge then at a minimum, you need to be able to perform under invariant conditions. That is, you need certain controls so that you can have confidence you can execute when you go live. The biggest factor is probably going to be the volatility.

It is true that getting 1:1 targets or worse is typically more common in day trading mean reverting markets. The only downside is that if your win rate drops, then your return will drop quite low. If you can find 2:1 target then your win rate is less critical.

There many ways to trade. I would like to see you make this work. Good luck!

This is why the market is a promising direction precisely because you can always choose what you like. The main thing is to try to study in detail the direction that you choose, and then everything will work out. You always have a choice...