Investing in Crypto can be extremely speculative but the volatility means active traders or short term holders can make great gains in a short space of time. Similarly you can lose money in a short space of time.
So what should you be looking for in a crypto if you want to be a long term investor?
1. What does the project hope to Achieve
Evaluate what use cases the project has and what real world applications is may have. What problem is it trying to solve? How does it hope to achieve that goal?
2. Evaluate the team
Pay attention to the team behind the crypto and do your research on their credentials. Usually all star teams are a good sign.
3. Check the funding and the marketing
Marketing isn't everything. Some projects are very useful but have poor marketing, however, marketing will help projects grow. Unfortunately, in this day and age, marketing helps things grow exponentially faster. You should also pay attention to the ICO and how the project is gathering funds. It is often apparent when cryptos are bad projects from their ICO practise and how they distribute tokens.
4. The community
This can often skew your view of a crypto because even trash projects have cult like followings. Don't buy into the community behind cryptos, rather research the crypto and the team. Sometimes, really good projects also have a really good community but you have to take it upon yourself to research everything.
With all that said, what do I think are 'good projects'?
Privacy
Everyone wants privacy and privacy will always be a front runner, especially when it comes to finances in an online world. It is probably a safe bet to invest in privacy coins. My opinion: Monero is and always will be the front runner, however, coins like Bitcoin Private and Zcoin to interest me.
Identification tools
Identification tools are going to be a big thing in future, or at least I believe they are. Identity verification tools on the blockchain will be something of the future. Tokens like 'The Key (TKY)' may be worth looking into. I'm sure there are others out there worth researching.
Platforms or infrastructure projects
A 'safe' investment may be to just invest in the actual platforms, blockchains and infrastructure projects. So you are investing in the actual platform which other projects are building on. For example Ethereum, NEO, Wanchain, Cardano etc. They are all blockchains which other projects use to build on. You see many ICO's being released on the Ethereum platform for example. This category is quite broad but ones I'm paying attention to are WAN, ETH, EOS, ADA, NEO, ICX, KMD, DRGN and possibly a few others. Like I said, many options here so do a little research.
Interoperability
This is going to be important with so many blockchains being created. Something like $AION is worth looking into.
Understand that 99% of crypto projects will fail and some are quite simply, well; useless. I do advocate for taking a risky 'moonshot' if you have the money and putting it in a low cap speculative crypto but this is dangerous and as with anything I write it isn't to be taken as financial advice, please do your own research and never invest what you cant afford.
If you do want to start investing then do yourself a favour and choose projects with a higher likelihood of longevity. Investing in some random shitcoin that doesn't necessarily do anything probably isn't a good idea. Try to understand WHY you are investing in something before you commit to it.
What are your strategies for investing in Crypto and which Crypto? Let me know in the comments.