I finally got around into looking into some of the finance stuff, after a few years of glancing at it but never bothering to do some reading. I plan to open up an account at a bank sometime soon to dedicate to trading stuff so I don't touch my regular money.
I'll go over some of my findings so far:
The best broker to use I have found is fidelity, as most other brokers are shady, like robinhood, or there have been instances of them messing with peoples accounts. The only issue I've seen with fidelity is that the charts on their mobile app might not be up to date, although their Active Trader Pro software it is fine. An easy option is just to use something like yahoo finance. It seems that there is a fix for it though.
As far as trading stocks goes, the big 3 options would be buying and selling stocks, buying and selling options, and buying and selling ETFs.
Stocks are likely the safest of these three options, and the most simplistic, with you buying the stock you wish to purchase, and then you sell it when you want to cash out, so no worry about losing money as you can only really lose as much as you put in.
Options are the next biggest thing in relation to stocks, and by far one of the riskiest things you can do as you can easily dig yourself into piles of debt with little recourse. The way options work is that first you must pay a small commission, usually about 0.5$ or around that amount.
There are 2 main types of options, there is a call, which is you saying I am buying 100 amount of stocks at a set price of 100$ for example and you won't be able to buy more than that 100 shares, however you are not required to buy any stocks at all, but you still have to pay the "fee" per share of stock, so you would be out 200$ because of the fee.
If your stock goes above 100$, then you are awarded the difference in price, albeit there is an extra cost you must pay per share, so it may be 2$, so if the stock price goes to 150$, you would be getting 48$ from that call. The potential to make a decent amount of money from this is buying tons of stock on a singular call, so say you buy 500 shares of a stock on a call for a net profit of 48$ per share, that is about 4,800$ in returns. Obviously this is a best case scenario, but it gets the concept across.
Puts are similar to calls with the exception that you do not have to pay that additional fee per share, so instead of 48$ it would be 50$ per share you would be getting. But the general idea of puts is that you buy a 'contract' for an option, where you may purchas a set amount of shares at a set price, but you are betting that the price will go below the price you paid for the shares, and you will get the difference in price minus the premium paid for each stock.
To reiterate above, you buy 100 shares at 100$ a share, the price drops to 50$, you now get 48$ per share or about 5,000$.