If you buy low and sell high you may make some money, but it will be less than you expected, take longer than you ever dreamed, and won't help you make more next time.
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Any other combination and you will lose money 99.99% of the time, and that 0.01% on a good day requires 1,000s of hours experience and the best technology available which retail don't have access to.
I know all this because we each have over 10,000 hours in the markets, use technology costing $100,000s to $millions, and the markets still manage to humble us from time to time.
But the allure of synthetic income, making money without physical work, is just too much for anyone to resist because they believe they can outwit the smartest, most well capitalised, conniving, unethical human beings on the planet.
Then you say, but myself Matt must be one of them, au contraire mon frère, we just wait for them to start sinking under their own weight and relieve them of their capital while they're flayling around, much more efficient, and much less risk.
Retail, they try and fight them head on which in most cases is suicide, and stocks are worse than futures because we've seen the most crazy “creative accounting” you can imagine, it's still not public knowledge and probably never will be. Buy what you know, and buy it cheap, otherwise you are on the road with a very painful ending.