Maybe you should concentrate your effort more on risk than on reward. You see, it's easy to quantify rewards but not so easy with risks.
Journalling is not enough alone (probably more on discretionary trading), you should read more to get more ideas to test and do more backtesting then. You can get a lot of ideas at a glance with a lot of info on all different kind of subjects at Quantpedia(.)com website.
The best advice you'll get is to give up. Put your money in an index ETF instead and do something else with your life. Trading is a hard way to make money and it's most definitely for the few. The odds are you won't be one of them.
I'm fairly sure it's the other way around, but maybe you mixed it up. If you buy a call your risk is limited to the premium you paid while the profit is theoretically unlimited. So, risk can be precisely determined while reward can only be estimated. If you trade outright in a liquid market using hard stops it's essentially the same.
Why do you think so? Couple of points: 1) the fact you are not thinking it is easy and need to do work means you are past level 0 or negative as some poser. 2) If you love it, then just go paper and work on it. There are so many tools that allow you to hone your skills these days without a lot of the risk. Paper->live small amounts, repeat 5 times. Then increase. Paper is practice, live has a bunch of additional challenges: Actual fills, PL, efforts increases, and sustainability. 3) If you don't love it and are doing it for money, especially basic needs money, then stop, or go pro and work for a firm for a paycheck. 4) Learn to trade via scripts or code. In the process you will "place" 1000's of trades and you will be able to assess your skills and system 100x faster. Best of luck
Look up 10k hrs of Deliberate Practice and it's evolution ~ 100hr Rule. Build a database of performance metrics. Iteratively refine
Maybe there just might be an edge if you consider it the other way around? But what does a noob like me know.