Serious alts are relatively safe to invest in. Peercoin, Dogecoin, Namecoin and most others who have a raison-d'etre have been doing great and actually lost less value than Bitcoin since yesterday.
One of the biggest risks for alts is that I cannot be bothered to manage the private keys for a zillion alts. I do this for my significant investments, but I keep a lot of baby alts on cryptsy (small amounts only), and we all know what can happen when you keep your coins on a centralized exchange ...