I've made loads of money trading equities. It's one of the few bets, where you always win. In the long term, the markets always have risen since they began. Simple rules will help you. Never bet on anything the press or stockbrokers recommend. Buy shares that pay a good dividend. Even if the share price goes down, you still make a profit. Never sell if the price goes down, since that's when you actually lose money.
Mind, you, when I first started trading in 2001, I didn't know what to do so I bought 1000 Ashstead shares at about £1 each on a recommendation from a newspaper article. Within weeks, they started to go down, and they carried on down to about 4p 2 years later. I forgot about them for 10 years because I considered them the dross in my account and it cost more to sell them than what they were worth. In 2014, when I checked my account, I found out that I had a lot of money in there. The Ashstead shares had risen from the grave to £10 each, so I sold half of them and cashed in a £4000 profit. The other half are now trading at £37 each. I thought of cashing in another half to take another £10,000 profit, but I don't need the money at the moment and they're still rising. The best thing is that wrapped in a nice ISA, so no tax. When i started that ISA, I bought a RBS managed ISA. In 6 years, it went down by £500, while the one I managed myself tripled in value, and that was before the Ashstead shares boomed.. What does that tell you?