Disclaimer: I am not a pro, adviser and without nearly as much experience as some of the guys on here. I have spent a long time playing with indicators, technical analysis, chart arrangement and looking at fundamentals. I have to be ultra cautious since trading has to never impact my overall financial situation. With that, a couple of comments on your questions.
I now am consistently making money, but that doesn't mean that every week I will not have one or two trades on which my stop is triggered and I lose that amount. At worst these mean there might be a week where I just break even. That hasn't always been the case. Early last year I had a run of losses and stopped trading for a couple of weeks to analyse where I had gone wrong. It turned out that there had been a run of days when the market followed a fairly consistent pattern and I based stops on a fixed level (10%). The pattern didn't hold and I was stopped out too soon almost every trade, losing 10% every time. Bummer!
A bit of luck, but not much. Skill - well I don't think that I am skilled. Lots of practice and trying to understand why trades went wrong and why they went right. Losses are far better teachers than wins. It isn't worth agonising over a trade that went wrong, but it is necessary to spend enough time trying to identify what caused you to make a mistake. Demo trading is not particularly realistic because there is nothing like the engagement that I have with live trading. Nonetheless, I do still go onto my demo whenever things are not working and especially, like today, when the market did something that I didn't expect, to just spend time playing without anxiety.
I never try to outplay anyone, not even Mr Market aka many thousands of traders and bots all trying to make money. I especially don't try to outplay the "big money" or the market makers but to trade in their slipstream. Having said this, I do interpret volume versus price movements to see what the professional traders (aka market makers) are doing, viewing them as "wholesalers" who determine when "retail" traders will buy or sell by selling or buying respectively themselves.
Candlestick charts are the primary information for deciding of whether to trade at all and then when to take and leave positions. After intermittently spending time over a couple of years with a friend chasing every indicator there is and playing with statistical analyses from engineering, social sciences, ecology and geology. [I didn't try astrology, tarot cards,or incantations!] My friend now says that using 9 indicators cobbled into some Bayesian analysis he was able to get a 95% success rate. He still hasn't traded money yet - analysis paralysis!. Perhaps because I day trade crypto or forex pairs, technical analysis doesn't work for me. Now I use price and volume which I interpret using Anna Couling's VolumePriceAnalysis (VPA). I also have a chart of the Woodie's CCI indicator on the screen. That is about what my mind can handle and it works for me. The thing is to try and enter and leave the market so as to make a profit.