first of all if you are a newbie how do you get a sense of what can hurt you and what can give you returns  ?
First you need to have that sense, take a look at cedric dahls video, that is titled 1000x return. You need to know many things first it's not that easy man !
You need to have guidelines on why you are investing on that kind of technology or that specefic coin .

first is what it is trying to do ? is the thing it is trying to do is significant ?
for ex: now im into (xyo network) and the thing it is trying to do is, it is the first proof of location blockchain based and the usecase for this is it can locate something all over the world which is very useful for me and can be valuable for a lot of big industries like (ecommerce where a customer can be able to locate where he's order is or a company can be able to locate where are their order stocks in realtime.)
2nd thing is it can be useful for lost items like, your car keys, your jewelries. also thieves will have a 2nd thought to steal something IF they know that something that they are going to steal is can be tracked by the police. It can also help the police when someone was kidnapped, the police can locate them faster if the person that is kidnapped wear something that is trackable by the xyonetwork like, watch, jewelry, bag, cellphone etc.

it's not finish there, you need to identify if the team behind the project is competent to deliver the plan on their roadmap. You need to know if the team specially the founder or the CEO has successfully founded and sold tech companies or alike companies before.

then you need to determine the competition, is this industry under or overserve ? or they do have competition ?
hint: if the industry is big but they have many competition, in other words over serve, its less likely to give you big returns because there's a lot of choices.
2nd hint: you need to find an industry even if it is small industry but there is no competition or they are big step ahead on the competition. That's a good clue. I wish i helped a lot of newbie here. cheers !