That used to be the case but it's not any more. Cryptsy is becoming a deathbed for coins.

What happens is the price balloons just "before" it gets listed, due to low liquidity on the minority exchanges, then when it arrives it tanks.

The reason for that is that mining is now a pump and dump operation due to the sheer number of alt coins around and the exchange provides miners with demand liquidity that was not available before it went on a mainstream exchange. The urgency is to dump as soon as it's on the exchange because the price is only going to go down - not up.

Look at for example, Moon. It traded as high as 0.0000033 BTC the day before it went on cryptsy. Then once on the exchange it dropped immediately to 0.0000010 and never saw more than 15 at it's peak after that.

The only "alt" coins that are worth holding long term are ones that have been specifically designed to fulfill a certain monetary role in a crypto-economy and that have gained a foothold as such. For example Peercoin was designed to support large transactions, not point of sales ones and had appropriate thought put into it's transaction fee structure, inflation profile, ratio of proof of work / proof of stake etc etc. Similarly Prime Coin (XPM) was an evolution of peercoin and was designed to support peercoin in it's role. NxT is a network which has genuinely evolved features such as decentralised exchanges, layer 2 services and 100% proof of stake etc. Bitcoin is bitcoin - a massively powerful computing network that no-one else can match, so it's future is secured.

Those coins may or may not be successful in the long term, but all I'm saying is the dynamics of cryptocurrencies are changing all the time and "getting on an exchange" is no longer the path to a "pump", it's now the path to a "dump" do to the number of miners who's sole purpose is to use mining as a value leverage exercise.