Van Tharp used to trade these types of stocks for his retirement account. He called them 'efficient' stocks. Stocks that are moving up smoothly. His approach was to trade them with a 20% trailing stop. That way you don't have to worry about any upside target, just go with them until they stop going up in a smooth uptrend.
typically intelligent people will argue there is no probabilities that each occurrence is independent unto itself. i know this you can flip a coin 1000 times and 500 will be heads and 500 will be tails even though there are strings of consecutive heads and tails in a row.
Yes, there are strings of consecutive heads and tails but it's short term variance and can't be predicted We can estimate variance and its probability but the next toss is 1/2.
"Higher risk should mean higher return." - only if you swing trade, for Buy&Holders it becomes less return.
It depends on skill. Lets take penny stocks as an example. A noob attempting trading on these, highly likely will lose everything, while a more skilled trader will beat the indexes.
The market doesn't care about any of that analysis. If you're swing trading just attempt to ride basic waves and turns and hope you don't just breakeven on your time or mis time and suffer losses. It's very easy to get fooled and whipsawed around in the market if you don't have a reasonably solid foundation of understanding expectations. But that's a failed strategy in my opinion. A trader has to decide if they will day trade or invest, there is no middle ground