Lower your capital and lot sizes if not profiting long term or even consider going back to demo for a while - no shame in it. What is your win %. Based on whatever it is, what risk reward on average do you need to break even or profit. Go from there.
If someone would know how to lose little, then probably nobody would lose lots of money actually. It's impossible, shortly answering this question. You can't lose a little, because when you have a courage after couple of successful deals, your conscious just turns off and here are welcome, gambling. That's why if traders want to stop compare gambling and trading, they must to learn how to control your emotions. When you have successful deals, just take it for granted and never think that you're the best and can earn more money. Of course, you can, but never let your conscious turns off, because it's vital.
How to lose little and ended up losing massively Let's say you are day trading emini ES. instead of setting max loss at 12 ticks, you set max loss at say 6 ticks. set the max loss appropriately. it cannot be too small or too big.
Not enough information to help. But I'll tell you what I do. Today, I was trying to get used to Tradovate's platform while (paper) trading a new contract (ES/MNQ vs my normal which is NQ because I wanted to try a massive contract size with low drawdown challenge). Early on in the day, because I am not used to ES, I somehow lost ~$250 so I figured I'd play with MNQ. I forgot about a badly placed stop and ended up -600ish. OK, I said, I'm not doing a good job and not paying attention. I'll go jerk off for a bit and trade futures in the afternoon session. I literally did no futures for a few hours (I also trade options, so long BABA, ADBE, ZM, BIDU, short PTON were my morning trades today in the real account and I had to watch them), came back, placed a trade on NQ and ended up close enough to breakeven. It could have been a bad day on paper if I didn't take a break from that. Just sharing what I do. Step 1, recognize that I'm not doing well Step 2, go do something else before it turns into a shitty day, Step 3, try again in the afternoon When you recognize you're doing shit. Just fuck off for the day, you earned it just for recognizing that you are doing crap. It's actually a pretty great feeling once you get used to it.
Also, my advice only applies if your system works and it's your fuckery that gives you losing days. I almost never lose money because of the market, it's always my own stupidity.