AFAIK running a waves full node which makes financial sense needs you to have a lot of waves (people should sell you waves, or lease you their waves) and that's a very competitive market. Most income belongs to the waves nodes run by old popular community members who are well-known and have been active in the slack for months.
With a few waves, your best choice is to lease your waves to a big node. It's completely safe and the node can't do anything to your waves except using them to mine. Right now, with a young waves blockchain it doesn't return much profit, but (certainly) it's better than nothing, which is what other coins give you when you hodl them.
Waves will get golden when they launch the final version of DEX, it gets a lot of ICOs on it, and the network gets busy.