When it comes to the question of investing crypto into this or that ICO one has to review website, White paper, chat with the team members and advisory board, watch official groups in Telegram, Slack, study smart-contract and Bitcointalk thread.
But this is a huge work for one person, taking into account the amount of ICO that is being held lately.
Except for your own study of the upcoming ICO, which sources of ICO reviews and ratings do you trust and why?
There's no need to do all of that with every ICO.
You can make your search far easier if you filter out the majority of coins. It's easy to do this with 2 simple filters:
1) Does the project have anything built? No? Move on. Forget about their big teams and fancy titles. Most projects have these and they cannot prove that they can build anything. Writing software is much more difficult than creating a one-page website or video. Several projects raised multiple millions and still haven't delivered any software. Let me know if you want examples.
2) Is the team from a corrupt country? Yes? Move on. In corrupt countries, ethics and honesty are more lax, which means that they will have a higher propensity to exaggerate or lie.
https://www.transparency.org/news/feature/corruption_perceptions_index_2016The third filter is harder to implement. You need to be able to do critical thinking. Does the application make sense? Jesus coin is an extreme example of something that doesn't make sense, but most are leaning towards this. Crypto currency is good for some applications (transfer or store of value, save fees, save time, gambling) but not all applications.
Most projects are trying to squeeze square pegs into round holes. There's a project that wants to connect locals with travelers to enhance the travel experience. You have to do mental gymnastics to figure out why an altcoin is needed here.
You have "Tokenizing Rising Tennis Stars: tokenstars.com/ace" in your signature. That sounds like somebody is trying to squeeze a square peg into a round hole. Why the hell would you have that in your signature? It's getting close to the Jesus coin.