2. You are looking for promising coins that are more profitable to mine than to buy. Mine, hodl, wait for the price increase, sell. That is, mining as investment. But here you need to process a very large amount of information, understand projects, and believe in the market growth.The risks are pretty big to get nothing.
I honestly think this shouldn't even be an option when mining(unless you just want to help the network). If you're going to mine at a loss anyway but you're just hoping or expecting a future price increase to make profit, it would make a lot more sense to simply just buy the coins straight off. That way, you'd have less monetary loss, and you're not degrading your hardware's lifespan. Probably just makes sense to do this if you want to purposely heat up your room lol.