Where did you finally invested your money?
20x is very possible in just 1 year. But I would recommend to diversify it to 2-4 coins. This reduces risk, maybe your #1 coin doesn't deliver but your #2-#3 coins do amazingly well. But don't diversify too much or you lose strength.
This was CoinMarketCap Top 10-12 coins 1 year ago (Dec 4, 2016). 8 out of 12 coins did more than x20.
Rank Coin 2016 MarketCap 2016 Change 20171 Bitcoin BTC $770.52 $12,346,014,952 x15.1 $11,629.9
2 Ethereum ETH $7.85 $679,896,251 x61.2 $480.07
3 Ripple XRP $0.007 $236,220,241 x39.9 $0.262
4 Litecoin LTC $3.92 $191,152,116 x26.4 $103.59
5 Monero XMR $8.34 $112,380,759 x24.7 $206.14
6 EthClassic ETC $0.782 $67,603,454 x39.8 $31.13
7 Dash DASH $8.8 $60,960,690 x91.2 $802.34
8 Steem STEEM $0.193 $43,627,481 x6.3 $1.22
9 Augur REP $3.35 $36,887,245 x11.9 $39.9
10 MaidSafe MAID $0.07 $31,768,623 x7.9 $0.551
11 NEM XEM $0.003 $30,870,455 x81.3 $0.279
12 Waves WAVES $0.242 $24,153,355 x26.2 $6.33
The average of the Top-10 is... x32.4
Had you invested 3,000 on each of the Top 10 coins (a total investment of 30,000) you would make in a year (Dec 2016 to Dec 2017) a total of 30,000x32.4 = 972,000.
The higher the Market Cap of a coin, the harder the coin makes a big % profit. For instance, Bitcoin had 12 billions MCap and did "only" x15, while the next coins did x61, x40, x26, x40, x91...
This was just the Top-10 (going for the secure-conservative shot). But the biggest Top-100 gainers?
Vertcoin (VTC) x390.0
MonaCoin (MONA) x268.3
NEO (NEO) x254.6
Blocknet (BLOCK) x121.0
Stratis (STRAT) x100.0
Decred (DCR) x99.1
Dash (DASH) x90.8
NEM (XEM) x82.9
Nxt (NXT) x63.8
FairCoin (FAIR) x63.0
This was just Top-100 coins (by Dec 2016). Probably bigger gains on coins below the Top-100. VertCoin was 99th in the Rank and its total MarketCap was $660,390... under 1M!
I think it is very important to research coins with low market cap (< 100-200M). But I would invest part of the money on "Stable" coins (Top 25-50) with room to grow and part of the money on "Promising" coins with lower MarketCap and then huge possible profits.
As an example, just in November, this coin: POWER LEDGER did x13 (from $0.056 to $0.74). From Nov 1 to today! And POWR still has a MarketCap of $200M.
Why wait 2 years? Focus and try to make x20 in a year. Then next year's goal: another x10-20 (for a total of x200-x400). Why not 20M instead of just 1M?