Trading Bitcoin is not profitable unless you have extreme patience and large capital to invest. If you can wait you just have to buy the dips that occur yearly and profit from the highs that also occur yearly. More than the lows as you can tell by the price;). Alts have extremely high risk vs reward. Only a few get lucky and when they do are they even disciplined enough to convert it into BTC and hold it long term?
Established alts are not as risky as you make them out to be, yes the risk is greater than the risk you incur if you invest only in bitcoin, but coins like ethereum or litecoin are not going to disappear or are going to be dumped since those coins have a high market cap already, you only need to choose some decent alts and you are going to be fine, now investing in icos and in coins with a very low market cap that can be very risky.