If you want to look at investments, DO NOT buy individual stock. DO NOT short stocks. These are gambles that people play, where you try to guesstimate what the general market thinks about future prospects of a company. Many stocks that over-perform, do not do so because the company is doing well, they over-perform because a large percentage of investors think it might do well in the near future.

Step 1 is just building a stable budget for your household. Pay off debts, earn more than you spend, build an emergency fund. Many companies have savings accounts that you can safely put money into that you can pull out at a moments notice without taking a loss because of a dip in the economy. There's no reason to look at anything else if you have large amounts of student loans, credit card debt, or car payments you're working off.

Step 2 is decide what you want to save for - retirement, a home, etc.

Step 3 is start investing towards that goal. Use investment portfolios that match what your Step 2 goal is.

Step 4 - What country are you from? Because the following advice is for Americans:

If you want to actually earn money, you do it slow and steady. Invest in whole market funds, like VTSAX or similar. They are called "whole market index funds" where you invest a small amount of money into an index fund and it grows along with the entire market. You would put money into a 401k, IRA, or other tax advantaged account, and put that money into a whole market index fund.

IF you have thousands of dollars that you are willing to just throw away and it doesn't matter to you, THEN you can start buying stocks like Reddit, TSLA, or whatever. But that money shouldn't be considered an investment.

Don't try to overthink the market. If you are wanting to invest with no plans to spend that money within say 3 to 5 years, just by low expense ratio S&P500 tracking ETFs. My goal isn't to beat the market, just ride with the market benchmarks as best as possible.

Tbh it's not very hard, just get a brokerage account with someone like fidelity or even Robinhood. As far as picking stock, there's no correct way that's applicable to everyone. Oftentimes people who obsess over crunching numbers and doing lots of research, will rarely make more than if they just bought index funds.

Long-term investments are a lot more about how much and how long you can invest, vs what you invest in. In general, I tend to buy stock in companies who I believe to be undervalued, particularly if it's been devalued in reaction to the media and not something like a bad quarterly.

Do you have retirement funds set aside an invested? If not, setting up or managing your own retirement account could be a good primer.

My advice is to read the simple path to wealth. I listened to the audiobook, its short and sweet and entertaining.

The gist: Nobody consistently beats the stock market (not even the people being paid to do so), don't try, it's gambling. Buy index ETFs when you have extra and hold on to them until you retire. Don't time the market, dont overthink it. Buy and forget. There's a part of the book where he says that the best group of investors were dead people and the second best were people who forgot about their investments. Idk if it's true but it stuck with me.

Spend a few hours learning about tax differed savings accounts or whatever your country offers and take advantage of them.

In my experience, being investing intelligently is really fucking easy and really fucking boring.

Set up Robin Hood or Acorns and drop like $100 a month into random stocks. NVIDIA is doing really well because of AI and is growing in leaps.