Just tossing this out there, I'm new to Cryto investing and have spent the past month plus trying to select investments that in my own opinion have  real world applications that have a relatively decent degree of providing returns. I'm trying to come up with a good breakdown out of the following for my portfolio. Any thoughts are more than welcome and diversifying should give me a better chance of an overall return.

And the choices are:

1) Etherium
2) Ripple
3) Stellar Lumens
4) Request Network (This project is just getting off the ground but the Whitepaper and timeline is of interest and great potential)
5) ShipChain (I don't see this hitting the exchanges until maybe March but I see the real world application with immense potential)

Thoughts on dividing these up accordingly? I've got $4,000 into Etherium now and ready to start to diversify. I'm thinking the
mainstay will be Etherium as I can see that heading towards doubling or perhaps better by the 3rd quarter of the year.

Looks to be a great project with REAL world use out of the gate. Ran into this one by accident and glad I did. If implemented as they project, this will be a serious competition for PayPal whose fees are costly by comparison.

I bought a little over 2600 Lumens on December 29th at .032, I'm fairly happy and it's going to sit in my wallet for a long long time.

This would be accurate, or at least very close. There is an update on the developer's blog with where they were, where they are and where they are going. I bought in at $1.62 and planning to buy more and HODL for an indefinite period of time.

[/quote] Does anyone know which exchanges the tokens will be listed on and when they will be listed?...Guess that is my only way on board the Shipchain now. [/quote]

I'd like to know as well, I've got a few friends interested in buying in and it would be a help to know what exchanges are planned.

Same here, very easy set up and it works very well vs doing spreadsheet.

Why don't you tell us all how you really feel? Call it like you see it. I invested $1600 on the 29th of December between Ripplie and Lumens.
Today, I'm up $2100 in profit. From an investment side of things, I am not complaining. Matter of fact, I'll be buying more and hodling.

Brand new guy on the block. In the world of traditional investments, I'm a big follower of Warren Buffet. When it comes to the world of Crytpocurrency,
if you were to pick 5 or 6 well known "experts" in Crytpocurrency, who are the "pros" that you would want to try to emulate?

Exactly, RESEARCH your investments and purchase based on same. Put in your wallet and forget about it. I just started recently and selected my investments based on reading a variety of sources. It's too easy to get caught up in the hype. No one can predict the market, if you are planning to day trade then you may lose your ass.
I invest based on real world applications that a given coin has the possibility of providing a solution to current issues in the business sector it affects.

I'm on Mac OS and use iPhone. Telegram not functioning properly. Tried to join FaceBook Group and not let in.

Ripple and it's partner Stellar have gone mainstream in short order and hard to believe. In 5 days, I've doubled my money in Ripple and tripled in Stellar. In my opinion FWIW and judging by reading the various news outlets and from information I've received, Coinbase is currently integrating Ripple behind the scenes. Coinsquare in Canada has publicly stated Ripple is in the works as well as a few others. IMHO, when Ripple goes mainstream on Coinbase, the sky is the limit. In a week, it's surpassed many of it's competitors and total market share is over half of Bitcoin. It'll never remotely get close to what the price of Bitcoin is due to the supply but it's possible in my opinion to reach $50 by end of 2018.

Read about this a month ago, very interested in getting in on the ground floor. Long term opportunity to solve a real world issue in the shipping industry is tremendous.

I looked at it from an investment standpoint, it made sense from the business perspective. I was too busy to buy it when it was at .25 a few weeks back. I bought Ripple on the 29th at $1.62 and bought 545 coins. On the same day, I bought 2,625 Stellar XLM at .32 each. So here we are a few days later and from a purely investment standpoint, I'm up $2,200 in profit and mostly from Stellar.
From a market cap perspective, in a matter of mere days Ripple is basically at half the market cap of Bitcoin which in insane. I am going to put another $2K into Ripple here within a week and hopefully before it hits Coinbase, it's going to go thru the roof at that point. If a company like Amazon starts to use it, there's no limit as to where it will go.

I'm in the same boat. I've been reading here for a solid month or so and there are countless threads with the same question.
Read, read and then keep on reading. No magic formula other than do your due diligence and invest wisely.

Thanks, I can cover the vast majority of those.

Thanks very much and I cannot read code, I'm a PI as in Private Investigator but I greatly appreciate the input you've given to me.

TOTAL newbie, albeit older guy with a question. I had the chance to buy into Bitcoin WAY back when it first came out and dismissed it as a scam without knowing anything. Well, clearly a foolish mistake as I did not do any research at all and blew it off. So, years later here we are yet again. I've been reading this site actively now for a couple of weeks, I read the various posts and do a bit of digging on some of the altcoins that have interest to me, Ripple being one of them. My question is, aside from this site and reading info on the various homepages, what are methods are generally used to research a coin before purchasing?

As an example, I found a site "Coin Checkup".

It seems to do a fairly good job and providing a snapshot of coins and predictions based on a fairly thorough analysis. I also do a fair amount of "Googling" to research the coins of interest. Research is in my blood based upon my profession but when it comes to the world of crypto, this is a totally different animal. I've picked up several good tips from reading this forum which is a tremendous asset and learned a good bit to date but no where near enough to dive in head first without doing my homework. I have no interest in actively trading, rather I plan to pursue coins which appear to offer the potential for a decent return over time. There's no such thing as getting rich overnight... well, I'd have admittedly been well off had I purchased Bitcoin many many years ago. Lesson learned.

Thanks in advance and thanks for the tremendous resources on this forum, it's an absolute asset.

@ Wiser a BIG thank you for your contribution. I've been reading as much as I can during the day on and off on this site. Doing research with Google based upon what I've read here. I'm an "OLD" new guy and if there's one thing I've learned in life is education pays huge dividends. I'll continue to follow this thread as you update it and continue to educate myself. I'm really not interested into getting into trading but I am looking to invest a small amount of say $2000 or $3000. After 10 plus days of research and reading I'm slowly narrowing down a list while I wait for my Ledger Nano S to arrive which should be by the weekend.