According to Whattomine.com, the highest profits could be acquired from mining the following cryptocurrencies:
Decred — with current profitability of 219 percent and a 7-day profitability of 132 percent
Zclassic(ZCL) — with current profitability of 182 percent and a 7-day profitability of 174 percent
Zcash (ZEC) — with current profitability of 172 percent and a 7-day profitability of 181 percent
Nicehash-Equihash — with current profitability of 165 percent and a 7-day profitability of 173 percent
Digibyte and Ethereum are also profitable cryptocurrencies at the moment. Mining Digibyte could turn out to be very profitable, as its starting to gain momentum and its likely to increase in value during the next couple of months. You can always use Whattomine.com or Coinwarz.com to calculate the profitability of your mining operations. The same goes for Ethereum, but it had a drastic increase in price recently, so the growth rate could be a bit slower than Digibytes.
Keep in mind that there are more than one way to profit from cryptocurrency mining. You can immediately sell the coins you mine and earn some extra cash, or you can keep them in anticipation of future increase in value. All of the major digital currencies have growth tendencies in the long run, so keeping the coins could bring high profits at some point. Especially if you get the high number of cheap coins, which could be worth a lot one day.
Before starting your mining operations, always do some research of your own. Some coins might seem like a profitable investment, but if they don’t have a set of useful features and a strong developers’ community that would allow its market cap to grow — it may be better to keep looking.
In order to understand which coins are profitable you can find website indexes such as CoinChoose that give you a complete breakdown of the each altcoin. On CoinChoose you can see the difficulty, where can you exchange them and what are the chances to profit in Bitcoins by mining each of those altcoins.
Finally, cryptocurrency mining is a bit risky and it often turns out unprofitable for the miners. Be careful and try not to rush into mining a coin just because its currently profitable. Do your research, as the cryptocurrency market is volatile and the mining could end up costing you money.