As a newbie, its still normal to deal with losses regarding on your trading journey. You can actually be assured that your profit will be 5 to 20% at first depending on the strategy and the market movement itself. There's no better teacher than experience.
Making 20% in the trading will be a big profit for every trader, but I don't think you can do that at this moment.
The bear market still with us, and I think it makes sense if you try to make 1%-5% of the profit because that will not be too difficult to reach that profit.
But you need to choose the right coin to help you to make that profit which is not easy to do.
The other thing he needs to do is be patient, don't greedy to get the big profit in one time of the trade.
We don't have to make a big profit in one time of the trade, but we need to repeat the trade over and over so we can make a bigger profit.
I agree with your argument that getting 1% -5% profit is better if done repeatedly compared to getting 20% profit at once. A 20% profit is also only in bullish market and rarely in bear market. But patience is also not enough to make a profit many times, a good trader also requires extensive knowledge and insight.
Many pro traders also often experience losses when trading, even to achieve a profit of 5% in each trade is quite difficult for them. So learning and experience are solution for now, to be able to make such a profit.
That is what I mean.
By getting 1%-5%, I think it will be easy for every trader who wants to make a profit even if they don't do day trading like other traders.
And that percentage will be bigger than they can expect if they can repeat over and over as you say.
I am sure that in a day, we can make more than 5% by doing trading more than 5 times.
But unfortunately, as I said before, most traders will be greedy after they can make a profit for up to 4 times trade and many of them will think "Ah, I should raise the percentage of the profit so that I can get more profit."
If the traders cannot control himself, then prepare to see the losses will come to him after the next trade.
Take a little profit, make it constant or stable, repeat the process, and you will make a bigger profit in the end.