Only BEST ALTS will do well, no worries about that (ANON, Good TECH, INNOVATIVE, or with honest good DEV's) How do I know? I did mined one currency called SummerCoin back in 2014 among few others like blackcoin. I have a lot of them but sold December 2015 for 2BTC. SummerCoin was re-branded to NavajoCoin. NAV project was always good and they had amazing good DEV, maybe a bit slow with updates but always keep promise! and always deliver! Today NAV is 3$. Many other coins died because they been neglected or just focused on price, NAV was different, always had good community and keep adding things to make unique! Like Anon encryption and few other things. 

I had a break from the crypto world and when I decided to go back and invest in ICO first time, I research a lot of information about it, my first 2 ICO's was  Monetha and BlackMoonCrypto, both been qualified as a flop in my opinion. What is important for is to make the right decision about go big, small or wait after hits exchanges and observe what will happen. Best ICO's have good reviews on YT, and plenty of information on the internet, plus good ANN thread here on the forum, smaller ICO's sometimes is better bought after is available on the exchange, all ways are good too but timing "when" is crucial. I snatched SONM Tokens ages after ICO (over a year) and price spiked just days ago from 0.12$ to 0.4$ now. Remember guys, buy Tokens is never too late as long as you hit that "open window" when the price is still cheap.

There is 2 ICO's I participated that don't fall directly into category SCAM but are a disappointment too. First is Bankera ICO, that it seems to take forever, so your money is "locked" until end of February 2018, no way to sell or withdraw. They pay dividends that are soo slim that on 100$ you won't even get 0.1$ a week, imagine you put 100$ on exchange and buy anything that is mooning right now. Second ISO is BlackMoonCrypto that failed with the promise to guarantee price on level 0.8$ per BMC for 2 years, funds been drained in 2 months! so you paid 1$/1BMC and now you are bag holder of 1BMC/0.5$ for god knows how long.

If you want to invest wisely my advice will create simple Excell spreadsheet with this columns:
A. Current Asset
B. Symbol/Ticket
C. Project Start
D. Current Value
E. ICO Price/Token
F. Value
G. Amount
H. Price Target
I. Market Cap
J. Rank
K. Circulating Supply
L. Total coin supply
You can keep notes on paper notebook (transaction details like date and price)
If you want to check anytime your profit/loss with coins/tokens I highly advice you to install on IOS/Android - Blockfolio. It can keep tracks of all trades, show you % increase in the last 24h and let you set up price alerts, shod/hide balances and display % investment in each coin.

You will need to send your Cobinhood [COB] Tokens to Cobinhood Exchange before 5th January 2018 in order to be entitled for CMT Airdrop. Minimum amount of Tokens is 500 COB. Below is a link to detailed instruction:

https://medium.com/cobinhood/how-to-get-your-cybermiles-token-if-youre-a-cob-token-holder-b8884f030754

Well well, if you make an investment decision based on how CEO project looks like and only taking into account his age then I think you will never buy Apple shares at the begging, will you? That's the biggest absurd I've seen recently on forum, sure CEO represents company image, I will give you that but if a student looking guy start ground-breaking technology idea and he is first in the market and you cut him loose just because it doesn't fit your CEO dream look - I think Vitalik Buterin (co-founder of Ethereum) wouldn't be your favourite CEO too.  

SONM should start shine in Q3/Q4 2018 when a first commercial version of the platform will be available for public use with the improved user interface, it's a long way from start to complete version 1.0  and this will just be the beginning. SONM is one of the projects I fully trust and never was worried about. In 2018 SNM can easy from 2$ - 4$, I disagree with 1$ price prediction.
Total supply only 440M, billion tokens break easy 1$ I can't see why SONM with much smaller total supply could cost less.

Never liked RIPPLE, it's centralised but even that didn't stop good marketing and developers to make millions $$$. I have nothing agains XRP just never like it and never will, but I had to admit, once is on WallStreet and is cheap lemmings will BUY so it's safe to say is a good investment that will bring profits for sure. I've seen price prediction for XRP in WallStreet magazine 2020 - 1000$. Hard to believe but if is 1/100 = 10$ this can make some owners rich.

In Europe you have Coinbase and no one mentioned www.Bittylicious.com, I use them for few years now no single problem. Buy Ethereum takes literally 3 minutes or less. Bitcoin a little bit longer (up to 2 hours to receive your coins) Website is simple, once you complete verification you are good to go. If you open new account you still will be able buy some ETH but amount will be very limited. What I do normally is I buy Ethereum and send directly to wallet address from EtherDelta where I buy ERC20 Tokens. I've seen some exchanges stop withdrawn your funds before verification is completed and this may take some time (days maybe 1 week) that why I prefer to use ED.

Call me old school, I like to pay attention here at ANN Token threads I am interested in.  In order to keep updated with latest news and updates, I recommend Telegram. Couple of websites I visit daily for general Bitcoin and Blockchain News:
1. https://www.coindesk.com/
2. https://cointelegraph.com/
3. https://www.cryptocoinsnews.com
Twitter and Slack are good options too, but use them less. YouTube is good for new ICO Reviews,
it can easily measure how popular upcoming ICO will be.

So it looks like right now we need to be patient and very positive waiting for updates from the Team. I still personally think PopcornTime was a BIG achievement, once you understand what they did in a couple of weeks programming. Now when compared to Netflix still I like more PopcornTime app, dynamic downloaded covers and content from various websites was very nicely executed. Can't wait what team will create now based on blockchain platform, it may be a YouTube killer if is done right.

Monday 18th December 2017 will be one of the main milestones in Bitcoin history - it will start trading on WallStreet with Ethereum and Ripple head to head. Bitcoin will hit mainstream, it will go to first page news on ant media around the world, can you believe it? If someone tells me a year ago "hey soon bitcoin will be traded on WallStreet" I will take this person for mentally ill. But things change quickly if favour for BTC and we will see how big impact will have on price very soon. I can't wait to see what will happen next.

coinvat thank you for detailed post about promising recent ICO's. Quantstamp (QSP) I already have and Flixxo (FLIXX) I was looking into but pass ICO time and when I look now on graph it's perfect time to buy. Flixxo was reviewed by Ian Balina and scored good/very good so no need to worry something is fishy with that project. Looks like Christmas time will be busy for us.

Everything is calculated starting from pre-ICO and ICO. Generally speaking, early adopters should be rewarded more than late investors in practice everything is related to how good is your ICO, how many whales are interested and if it ticks all boxes for them you may get really good deal.  One in five ICO's out there is a very good investment so you must do your homework your own research and make sure you picked the right project then yes it will be very profitable short and long-term. I participated early in 3 ICO's one was profitable from day one, and two others are flops for short-term and might improve with time (as long-term investments) Generally if you do your best and you pick right project pre-sale and ICO are very good ways to invest but be careful.

Best exchange is an exchange you can TRUST to the level that transfer your hard earned money IN/OUT is without any risk of freezing funds, delays or simply stopping you without any reason from withdrawing your FIAT/Coins. Sadly now days is different and a lot complains can be heard about exchanges stealing BTC or freezing funds. One simply check on google "exchange name" "reviews" will bring you scale of problems with any exchange you want. The Future is decentralisation and Kyber Network (start Q1 2018), Cobinhood (start Q1 2018) are good examples of projects that will fix all issues that current exchanges have, currently EtherDelta is the best way to buy and sell ECR20 Tokens. There is no central administration and technology behind ED is based on smart contracts. EtherDelta may be difficult to use at first but once mastered is simple good exchange that is secure, no need to worry your Tokens will be stolen or frozen.

Monetha attracted wide spectrum of investors - 100% agree. There have been very big investors in ICO participating, true. MTH ICO was one of fasters initial coin offering ever, but with all that positive things happened at the beginning we are still not moving forward. There is a lot impatient Monetha holders out there, and investors that right now are at loss but if they HOLD nothing wrong will happen, just need a lot of patience. I can see Monetha team doing their best, before Milestone 01 is completed we can't complain about Token rank/price.

Safest way will be always cold storage, a computer that is offline no internet access via LAN or WiFi (ideally not present at all) Wallet is created in an offline environment. You can buy hardware wallet that is very secure, impossible to lost coins once you get to know how to use it, even your computer is compromised and someone has access in order to create transaction you will need to put the PIN code on your wallet and confirm the transaction. Most popular hardware wallets are Trezor and Ledger Nano S. Next step down is wallet on your PC - for Bitcoins Electrum is a good way to go. For Ethereum ERC20 based Tokens - MyEtherWallet is OK. Remember you can check balance in Ethereum explorer no need to login to MEW every time same with BTC using explorer. I use MyEtherWallet - passwords and private key I keep encrypted on offline PC with VeraCrypt (based on TrueCrypt). Cold storage and hardware wallet will be the most secure way to store Bitcoins and other alts.

I will wait for an exchange, sometimes if you not sure you can still bargain a good deal of the exchange. I accumulated this month twice already coins I trust, follow and I want to invest more. Right now I need to wait until Christmas time is over and after New Year will start again. This year was a lot of difficult decisions for me, let's hope your NAGA ICO will do it great and everybody who wants to participate as a later investor will still get a good price of the exchange. Thanks.

If your threat Bitcoin as a "commodity" and keep in cold storage without using like portable hardware wallets:  Trezor or Ledger Nano S then maybe volatility is not your concern because for a long-term investment Bitcoin beats anything that Banks can offer you. Problems arise when you want to use Bitcoin every day as a payment for goods then small volatility is not a bad thing, but what happens when your BTC is going up and down more than 10% in a 24h? Perfect example is STEAM, they quit for now because of that, I don't know when this will change but for now is not a good thing for sure.

No one knows, we talking about Token that is 1000+ position on Coinmarketcap! I think even most experienced guys will have problems with prediction what can happen next! I am accumulating now, small but surely above 1K+ STU, sometimes taking huge risk is profitable and I keep my fingers crossed for this little gem.