I'm also a noob just getting in to alt coin mining, after trying out bitcoin mining about 7 months ago. I have an nVidia card, so my hash rate is limited. Bitcoin obviously didn't work, but with altcoins i'm having some success. I'm seeing a lot of coins pop in to existence lately - but how often do they pop out of existence? Speculation seems to be literally driving the market, and there's so many competing opinions. It seems everyone's guessing - so I've been trying to do the same. Currently looking at megacoin, stablecoin and worldcoin. even LTC is too hard to mine now unless you have a pretty serious setup.