exactly, latency is a big issue i found. Maybe the cause of most forks. I've seen alts with 3 or 4 different chains going on at the same time, forks you could send coins between chains back and forth, blockexplorers on different chains and whatnot. I've seen coins break in many ways. I think it's due to latency very often.
Attacks do happen too. Look at megacoin. Its network was crippled for whatever reason. It never recovered because of that.
Knowing early when the coin you are holding starts to be defunct (mostly more problems occure after first problems show) could give you a decent edge imo.
Personally i think most altcoin blockchains have hickups at one point or anther.
Possible we've seen KGW fail too, i don't know.
Let's not even talk about POS, they fork all the time ... clams forked to death, PPC forked to death and so on ...
knowing in realtime when forks occure will be valuable info to a trader.
If someone of you coder-guys would write a good software for such detection i think that software could potentially sell for good prices around here... or host a website which shows data for many alts. You could earn a lot via advertisement on such a site imo.
Just an idea for you coders ... if you can deliver a working product for that you should be able to earn some money on that imo.
Traders are hungry for easily accessible realtime data. There is money in providing those services.