Market cap matters if you're taking a "buy and hold" approach. If you are a day trader, it is true that a price under $1 is likely to see more purely speculative gains. That's because an awful lot of people think the way the OP does. So it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy that money pours into these cheaper coins, even when their market cap is ridiculous.

For those not understanding why market cap matters for the long run, consider the current value being delivered by ETH, a platform that so many ICOs are coming out on. You have to buy ETH to buy into most of those ICOs, plus systems are running on it. That gives the coin real value.

Then consider some of these cheap coins with ridiculous coin supplies that are in the top 20 coins. Now I've bought into some myself, but I've also been trading in and out of them, taking the gains. That's because there is no way these coins are worth as much as ETH in terms of value being delivered. Yet the other day one was knocking on the door of actually passing ETH in total market cap! A coin that isn't even crypto, that is not currently in use anywhere, and that by virtue of its own purported mission has to be kept at a pretty steady price so that banks could use it for transacting.

So yeah, for a while it was 10x for even someone who bought in just a month before (me), but it can't maintain that. There is no way that coin could survive longterm at those prices because the market cap above ETH's is too absurd for the speculative bubble around its mainstream media pump not to be pierced.

Anyway, to answer your question... good day trading options under $1 are TRX, XVG, RDD
Good hold coins under $1 are SNM, LEND, and XLM.

Good luck!