What am I missing here - question about speculation on smaller currencies.

[yorkshireman]

About a year ago I bought some BTC for £7.  Had I bought £500 (which, you may have guessed, I didn't) it would today be worth £21,500.

I have been looking at the charts for the lesser cryptocurrencies.  LTC has more than tripled in the last three weeks.

Let's imagine that someone spent £500  / $750 today on LTC or something like Peercoin (which is at $1) and waited a year.  Might LTC and/or Peercoin not go up 10 or 20 fold as BTC has?

If so, then why doesn't everyone spend a few hundred pounds or dollars on the smaller currencies right now? 

Of course, I could buy LTC at $8 and it might fall to $4.  But BTC had numerous fluctuations throughout the year.  For an investor who planned to hold for, say, a year wouldn't my idea make sense?  Couldn't the success of BTC be repeated with the smaller currencies? 

I don't mean currencies which are two weeks old.  I mean the type listed here which are somewhat established: http://my-btc.info/coin_charts.php

I know that buying would be a speculative venture but my impression is that cryptocurrencies are increasingly popular and mainstream.  Might LTC or PPC not become a quarter or third as popular as BTC?  Wouldn't it be the case that people who buy at the bottom would potentially be in for big profits as happened with BTC?

What am I missing here?  It can't be that easy surely?

[MicroGuy]

If so, then why doesn't everyone spend a few hundred pounds or dollars on the smaller currencies right now?

Because there are a lot of other altcoins that don't have serious development or growing communities.

I agree that the next big step in the evolution will be the emergence of the altcoins into the mainstream but the difficulty is in picking the winners. Find those with the most talented developers, the strongest communities, and rock-solid fundamentals and you should see some nice returns in 12 to 24 months.

[yorkshireman]

So which altcoins do people on this forum suggest then?