The time to buy alts will be exactly when the Bitcoin ETF is accepted and everyone ditches the alts to buy BTC. This will increase Bitcoin's dominance and the alts will bottom for a short period of time.
Then the Bitcoin profit takers will sell and buy the bottomed out alts.

Mostly get listed and do nothing. The ICO benefits from the credibility and popularity of the advisors. The advisors get paid in tokens for agreeing to be presented as advisers. BitMex blog has a very good graph showing how interconnected are the same advisors with multiple ICOs.

I am definitely seeing a bullish sentiment starting to arise. With all the Bitcoin ETF talks lately, and all the hypish positive news, it seems that some big game is being played.
All of a sudden new celebrity investors popped up. These are some signs.

Skycoin got dumped pretty heavily after the Binance listing and the following fiasco with one of the founders.
I bought it at Cryptopia a long time ago. I think it is undervalued for now.

This project is all-in-one solution. It is very ovrwhelming. It even sounds fishy to me. Plus the team is russian I think. So scam alert, scam alert.
You can't build stuff in one place that 20 different projects are trying to do one piece at a time. I am not a believer this project is real.

If you bought the Cardano just prior to the Coinbase announcement, then you are golden. Or super lucky.
Seeing what happened with EOS prior to mainnet launch, I can definitely expect this same dynamic going on with Cardano soon.

This is pretty surprising for me. 5 new tokens at once. And some of them are weird choices. 0x? Basic Attention Token?
And what does testing means? Dozens of exchanges have already listed them. I don't get the "testing" part of the announcement.

It may very well be the Holochain (HOT). One of the genesis Ethereum wallets invested for the first time since the Ethereum ICO and it was exactly in the Holochain ICO. It is different. Agent centric VS data centric. I believe it has some potential.

Well, most of the cryptocurrencies are ETH based. I think that the ones that build their own blockchain like Electroneum are more interesting and serious projects.
I am looking at them, because the level of execution required is much higher.

I can't give a shit less for cryptojacking than I am. Somebody is making money from me visiting their website. Isn't it how it works for years? I am paying more electricity bills now? Good, maybe that will let the site owner offer me a new free service.

I completely agree. ICOBench is a great aggregator, but a terrible rating site. I like the features, though. You can sort out the ICOs and navigate the information about them easily. 

1) Good team. And good by my measures are experienced business people with a lot of connections and past projects.
2) Unique idea. Less competition. I don't care how good a project is, if it is a social media. There are way too many and the chances this is the new facebook are close to zero.

The good news is, there are a lot of them already. The bad news is, most of them will never shoot up.
So you have to be very picky and you have to do the work.
I like Rivetz and Helbiz. They bring something unique as a concept and I like the potential.

What do you mean by ICO failure?
1.The ICO didn't manage to collect the money? A lot of them. Check ICO aggregator sites -> ICOs -> Past
2. The ICO collected the money, but failed to execute and deliver? I don't think there are much right now, because all of them have 1-2+ years long roadmaps.

I don't think Litecoin has a future long-term. It achieves nothing more than Bitcoin.
If the whole market goes up 4x soon, then yeah, LTC will hit $400.
But I don't think the market will make even 2x this year.

Scammers will find a way to mimic and impersonate everyone, everything and everywhere. This has nothing to do with Ethereum, NEO, EOS or any particular platform or company.

I can imagine this going in two different ways:
1. You make your own deep research
2. You rely on ico rating sites and take others opinions for granted. If the majority of people think the same way, then this means hype around the project.

In the first case, you are more likely to find a hidden gem and hit it big.

How much privacy coins are needed? Just one. But we don't have a winner yet and many are trying to do the best job.
How much social media sites do we need? One, if it has all the best features.
How much search engines? Again, one.

There will probably be some niche use cases that some other coins can grab a market share.

A lot of ICOs lately are prolonging their sales if they are not happy with the raised money. And yes, most of the time the early investors are at a disadvantage.
Parkgene gave 50% bonus out of nowhere after they didn't collect much money in the official dates and prolonged.
Watching the price now (Parkgene) being 80% off ICO price, I can easily imagine even undisclosed private sales to pools with even greater discounts.

What I am observing is that the number of projects is growing every month. Over 2000 now. And the money in the ecosystem stay around 400 Billion $. Same numbers as in November.
So if number of ICOs keep growing and no new and fresh money enter the market, then we will have too much projects and the price of most will drop.