I shared this during my recent interview on the forum;
Someone should only invest in what they are actually interested in, special education cannot grow genuine interest. This may be a bad strategy as it limits your portfolio.
Rather than doing research to find out about coins to invest in, I would look for projects that actually interest me, this would help you avoid information overload as you only stick to what you have knowledge on or have interest in understanding. Of course, interest would not always result into investments. A project can have an attractive idea but no feasible road map to realize that. This would then bring the investor to the second and third points you mentioned; preliminary research and market analysis.
There is just so much information going around that I end up just sticking to the tried and tested ones like Bitcoin, Ethereum, etc.
Sticking to
tried and tested coins is a somewhat safe strategy, but, the mistake I think investors make is using Market Capitalization as a metric to guage a project by. A cryptocurrency making it into the top 50 or 10 list by MC is not an indicator of a good investment (the list has shuffled over the years). One would still need to do layers of research to determine which is worth investing in.