I'm pretty new but I've been putting in hundreds of hours of work on trading and I'm convinced that success in this game really depends on experience more than anything else. One example of this that I never hear talked about is how you fundamentally look at charts when you're beginning vs. when you have some time under your belt. It's easy to look at a chart and spot entries and exits but it's a different story when you're looking at the patterns develop in real time. After a while, I started to look at charts from a perspective of: "ok, I'm on this bar and I'm seeing this, how could I have identified the right course of action without taking into account what comes after that bar (period)? It seems like common sense but i think it's easy to subconsciously miss this point when developing a system and later find yourself hesitant to take entries or taking the wrong entries.  

Another experience based thing is simply figuring out all the mechanics of trading and orders and becoming thoroughly familiar with the tools that your broker gives you. This doesn't happen overnight but I think it's really key to developing an effective strategy. It's like, somebody can tell you in mechanic school to that you need to tighten this bolt with a torque wrench, but if you don't have experience and confidence using the tools to complete the task, you're going to be slow and make mistakes with it. This is especially true with day trading because your mind will be working on a bunch of different factors to trade as it is and it's important to have your tools down as second nature so that you can focus on what you need to.

I've listened to many hours of interviews with successful traders of all kinds and it seems to me that the one thing they all agree on is that experience and time are things that you absolutely need to be successful and almost all of them experienced years of losing or not making much before things started to click for them. The more i trade, the more I understand why they all say this.