You should look into and study markets in general before investing as everything essentially has risk associated with it. The crypto market is one of the highest risk markets out there with large swings up and down. They are a virtual currency so they have no earnings, just move based on peoples sentiment and technical movement based on the charts.
So you should look into some technical analysis which is studying the price movement of the asset on a chart. (Tradingview has good charts for cryptos) If you go long, you do not want to purchase when the price is declining as it can continue to drop further and you will lose money. So people wait for an uptrend before they purchase,,,,this is easier said than done and takes some charting analysis.
There are a lot of good books on technical analysis, check some out.
Thank you for your reply. I did research on technical analysis from videos by Datadash and other youtubers but have forgot most of it as I haven't purchased any coins in a while, I will continue my research again! I was thinking of reading some books. Would I look at general trading books like from the stock market because I was thinking there wouldn't be many decent crypto books out there seen as the market it so young? Any recommendations?
I have no specific recommendations as there are so many. You may want to read 2 types of books, one for investing as this is a longer term hold and one specifically for technical analysis and all traders use this technique.
Regarding the time to buy, I personally think it is a good time to scale into positions. Why? If you look at the BTC price based on the GDAX exchange, it hit a high last Dec of just over 19k. It corrected back down to the mid 5k level which was a significant price reduction. (Most pro investors/traders wait for major pullbacks before taking positions to go long)
I also looked a a fibonacci retracement from the low in July 17 to the peak in Dec, it dropped to the .236 fib level which is one of the potential reversal points. On a percentage scale, BTC dropped 70.6% from the dates mentioned above. Not a bad discount for those shopping I would say...