Altcoins may be tricky to trade, but most of us could be sleeping easy if we basically checked two things.
One is a project with a good team that is dedicated and competent to implement the promised ideas. Two is a coin with an innovative purpose and a promising future. With those two, you can definitely be positive that what you have there is a good coin to invest in.
With that, go check out the coin that is in my sig MeVu.
Then you haven't "invested" in a lot of coins to know that "good team, dedicated and competent" doesn't necessarily affect price. I can give you at least two examples of really good tech, really good team, and all ideas implemented if not more. Gigabyte comes to mind first because it didn't even have an ICO, and yet they kept developing their coin and wallet and last year did so much tech most ICOs can't even achieve, and a merchant network too!
Price? Still went down by 90%!