It really depends on what time you invest in altcoins. The high risk you are talking about we have seen hit people hard this year-- a lot of the altcoins have gone down over 50% in terms of their BTC ratio.

People believed that when Bitcoin would start correcting altcoins would start to regain the lost market share, but that hasn't been the case so far. Almost every Bitcoin dump lead to an altcoin dump instead of a pump.

And then we have a lof of people looking at the 'low' altcoin prices and think they won't be going down any more. Reality is that they can go down a whole lot more than what people consider super low already.