What Stats Should one Factor in When Choosing an Alt Coin to Mine?

[ShefSam]

I would think that a low difficulty with a limited available supply... along with a decent trading volume

Your thoughts?  Are there any hard and fast rules?  without factoring in choice of equipment, technology, and energy costs what are the Coins attributes to consider?

What makes a coin attractive to mine?

[aballen]

I think there are two factors really.
1) can you mine it profitably?
2) do you think it has a positive trajectory?  in which case, you can mine it for no profit.

Personally I think mining for a loss assuming something will go up is silly. You are just better off buying some with fiat at face value.

All that said, check out Monero, I think you can still mine with GPU and make some $$.  Possibly even CPU.