There is no question about it, if you want big money, ICO's are where it's at.

If you don't know what you are doing, it's also the fastest way to lose a lot of money.

Just like with trading coins, knowing which ICO's to get involved with is all about data-mining and knowing what data is most important. In fact in some ways its easier data to read and learn about.

Picking your ICO listing site

Having a quality ICO listing site in my opinion is one of the most important aspects of finding the right ICO's to get involved with.

Not all listing sites are made equal and there are a few things to look out for and a few things to avoid.

What to avoid

The first thing you want to ensure about the list site you chose, is that it does not have advertising on it at all. If you use any sort of ad blockers. disable them when looking for a ICO listing site.

A Quality ICO listing site will be involved with the community and will not need to use advertising to support it. If it has advertising, it is not nearly involved enough with the community.

Avoid the trading platforms for ICO news. Trading platforms are given huge incentives to promote an ICO and they will not always be honest and upcoming with information that may be negative, because their goal is to get you to invest in the coin.

Quality ICO listing sites will generally offer a paid service to list and promote an ICO but they have no specific incentive to vote one coin over another because unlike trading platforms, they don't have to care about sale volume at the end of the ICO.

The Token Market

The Token Market is by far my favorite ICO listing platform. Although it is basic in design, it gives me all the details I need to determine if a coin will have a successful ICO.

TokenMarket is a marketplace for tokens, digital assets and blockchain based investing. Basically its the place to go if you are going to launch a blockchain based project, and its the place to be if you are seeking new projects.

One of my favorite features can be seen in the screenshot above, and that is the ability to sort the assets based on their respective blockchain.

Examining an ICO

You can see in the screenshot at the top of this article, that some of the ICO's are listed as "hot". I need to stress that this information cannot be trusted. Just because a piece of information is listed as "hot" is no excuse not to research.

Lets examine two of the coins listed as hot ICO's.

First we have Rivetz.

At a first glance, Rivets does indeed look promising.

Having a following of 741 people could mean that there is a good community interest.

People who following an ICO are believed to be interested in the coin and the launch.

The next few bits of information, also look good at first glance, but there are a couple alarming things.

Its nice to see they have website, blog, and whitepaper. However upon inspecting those links, the whitepaper returns a 404.

This could mean nothing, but from the perspective of an investor its everything. Why would I invest in a coin who's whitepaper I can't see?

More alarming is the fact they have no github page. Now github is not the sole place to host an open source project, and not all blockchain projects are open source.

If however, a project is not open source it should have a great explanation as to why, which leads us back to the missing whitepaper.

The second most important piece of information

The second most important piece of information, is the thing I consider "make it or break it" in terms of ICO's.

A successful ICO and the future success of a coin is directly related to the marketing team and the marketing plan behind the coin.

Therefore if a coin is coin to be successful, it should have solid marketing backing up. This is where the vast majority of ICO's fail, and its what keeps me picking winner after winner.

As can be seen in the screenshot, Rivetz is not a coin I would invest in. Why? Because It has a broken white paper, no github project, and only 1 backlink to their website - and the ICO begins in 2 days!

Lets compare the first "hot" ICO to the "hot" ICO of bitJob, which has been running for 1 week.

As we can see, this coin has a considerably smaller following with only 349 followers. This may not be good, but it is certainly not a deciding factor.

Examining the exactly same information we did in the previous ICO, we can see some considerable differences.

First it's worthy of noting this team cared enough to fill out every detail. This included the github address and the linkedin address.

Second I checked all the links just as in the previous example and on this ICO listing, all the links work.

There is a solid whitepaper hosted on google docs, their is a blog on medium, and they have a working .io project site.

This is all looking good so far, so lets take a look at the backlinks count.

I should mention that a solid project, should have at LEAST 100 backlinks. If one doesn't have at least 100 they are not even trying or caring about the marketing aspects, and that is a bad sign for future growth.

Having 4551 backlinks when an ICO launched 5 days ago, shows the team put in a lot of footwork before they even launched.

This is absolutely outstanding news. It shows this team is thinking and they want to see their coin succeed.

It means they have a solid marketing plan and that plan is working for them.

The most important piece of information

We didn't even get to the most important piece of information with the first coin, because that information became irrelevant when none of the rest of the information was on point.

However so far what we are seeing with bitJob does lead us to the single most important thing one sfould research before putting money into an ICO.

Logically the question is who is on the team?

Always research who is on the team. Find out what they have developed before, what they have marketed before, if they have stack overflow profiles search their questions, research who they are and what their experience level is.

If you cannot find out a thing about the people involved with a project, do not get involved.

In this instance, I actually have stumbled upon a coin who's development team is filled with people I already know, and that was by sheer chance.

This means I can skip the legwork of investigating who people are, because I already know the team.

Gut feeling ICO's

The truth is, every serious investor, just like every serious gambler has what is call the "gut instict" play.

Its when you have a feeling that tells you to ignore all the data and make an investment despite what the data shows.

Sometimes there are other pieces of data outside the norm you are taking into account, and sometimes its just a sheer gamble.

Never ignore your gut plays. Pick and choice wisely when to follow your gut, but do not simply ignore it and play the odds.

I warn about this to prevent you from failing. Ignoring your gut, will cause you to look back at things and say "if only I listened".

Before you know it, you start making bad calls. It never fails. Do not ignore your gut even if its just to prove to yourself from time to time, why play the odds.

My gut coin of the moment is called UNIKOIN GOLD.

All the data says I should not do this, however I have also taken into account who the team is, who their promised investors are, I have read the whitepaper, I have checked out the website, and despite what is lacking - I just know this coin is going to explode in value

The ICO is still a month away, but my plan is to drop at least a bitcoin in it.

So once again I hope I have taught some people some things. Instead of my usual coin picks, I am giving you two ICO picks, both mentioned in this article, one is currently going on, the other starts in a month. Thos ICO's are bitJob and UNIKOIN GOLD