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.
![Grin](https://bitcointalk.org/Smileys/default/grin.gif)
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.