Coins to invest in bear market are always Bitcoin and Ethereum. We may add BNB to this minor list as it grew a lot in business value over time. All other coins are risky as f*ck. And what is hurry even? There is gonna be better time to buy different altcoins.
Every coin is risky and volatile including bitcoin and ethereum but there's a use case for them but that doesn't mean Whales cannot manipulate the price for the short term..Manipulating bitcoin's price for the long term will be hard for them.
Altcoins are easy to play with for whales so there's a good chance of making or losing money in them, it's like a gamble.
Its because most of altcoin has a very small matketcap. I dont think whale can manipulate ethereum because the market relatively big now. It need very large ammount of money to manipulate ethereum. Eaither group of early adopter or very rich group of people.