Here's what I'd do:
(Full disclosure: I'm pretty new to mining, crypto, trading, etc. But I think this is a good plan, it's working for me so far.)
First, buy some BTC, say... $10k worth.
Go to Bittrex, put your BTC in a wallet there.
Buy a bunch of different kinds of alt coins. Research them first, try to pick good ones, etc etc. But get a very broad selection of them. Look for ones that occasionally spike to 150%-200% (or more) of normal level.
Structure your automatic sells so if you buy 5 coins for $10, you sell 4 of them for $12.50, then sit on the 1 you have left. So if you buy 100 at $10, sell 80 @ $12.50
Leave it alone for a while. Two weeks, a month maybe. Don't just sit there and watch it, you'll be tempted to micro-manage the process.
When you come back and look at it, most of them will have hit the auto-sell, covered the initial expense, and left a remaining fraction that was basically free.
Some of them won't have caught, and if you've given it a month and they did not, you might want to sell those off. Or if you're feeling gutsy, buy more at the lower rate, restructure your sells the same way as before but with the new average buy in price in mind, and wait on them again.
Most of them will have caught because traders routinely pump up any/all of the altcoins to levels way past +25%.
So then you have a portfolio of coins that was basically free. Sell enough to cover the expense of the ones that didn't catch. Remove 100% of your initial investment from Bittrex and put it back into long term savings. Bitcoin would be a safe bet, or silver.
Then I like to setup auto sells with the free coins harvested so as the coin price hits certain targets, it sells off enough for a consistent payoff. So if coin is bought at $5, and I want to make $100 per payoff, and I have 20 coins, I'd have sells at 10 for $10, 5 for $20, 2 for $50, 1 for $100. That's 18 of the 20, then hang onto a couple for later. You'll want to adjust those amounts to reasonable levels for any given coin but that's the idea. Every time it hits a new higher target -> payday ($100 each in this case, $400 total). IMO this is better than say... putting in an auto sell of 20 for $100. Sure you'd make 5x as much... IF it ever hits. Big if. Or selling 20 at $10, you only make $200 but if the pump actually went up to $100, you missed out. With sell targets like I outlined, you get a nice payout at all stages of a good pump and dump. And you don't have to do anything, it just happens automatically over time.
Once the money from your free coins has built up enough to be relevant, take half of it and do the same process again with it. Repeat until you have a giant stack of money.
On top of that, you could also mine. But why? If you don't have to, and you can do all this from a laptop with zero overhead of power / location / security / etc etc... I'm not sure it's worth the trouble. What I'm suggesting takes a couple hours a month.
Out of curiosity, why would you rather gamble with trading altcoins instead of putting $40,000 into ASIC's and making thousands of dollars per month without much of the same risk?
