Check these:
1.
Active Development Team of Multiple people with known identities.
2. Look for "
Low MARKETCAP" not LOW PRICE. PRice doesnt matter. ALWAYS look at circulating marketcap (which coinmarketcap shows you) and TOTAL marketcap (which coinmarketcap does NOT show you, thats all coins to ever be mined multiplied by current price.
3.
Premine percentage, or ICO (same thing, ICO is basically 100% Premine with a different name).
4. Watch out for
DEV tax. While Dev tax may be a good thing for some coins, in many occasions the rogue developers end up with so much money they could DUMP $100 million dollars while you are trying to make money off of your $1500 investment so the coin tanks, like BCC did. And BCC was not even 100% premined.
5. Always
invest in POW and never in POS. POW means there are miners behind it who invested time and electrical power to gain the coin, they wont dump for cheap. POS means there is greedy developer who owns a million times more coins that you do and could dump on you faster than you can wake up in the morning to notice.
6.
No forking plans. Typically when coins that are half baked go for forking ALREADY (such as ZCL where it doesnt even have an android wallet and the developers are FORKING away) then it means there is a huge level of greed behind it.
7. Watch out for
secret code. Most privacy coins have secret code built in for the developers to create unlimited number of coins. That's why privacy is so common with new coins as the counterfeit coins can be used and tracks will be covered. ZCash development team pretended they "destroyed" the piece of software code that is worth billions of dollars, Yea, they did. Whatever. So anything based on ZSnarks can technically have the same code.
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For me so far BTCZ checks all the above with a nice green checkmark.