I wouldn't pay much attention to market cap at all....
I understand that even market cap can be manipulated by either faking out the price or by inflating the circulating supply but, to me, it still has a role when deciding which coin or token to look at and possibly trade actively. I also look at how long they've been at the top 20 or top 50. It's a good indicator for me if they're able to sustain their ranking for a long time.
Since there's different ranges of altcoins, I'm a fan of trading big caps to mid cap tokens. Tokens in these ranges usually have very little manipulations and don't have absurd increase in prices that is usually followed by a classical dump. Before trading any asset, I have to make sure that:
1. The project has a community: truth be told, only projects with an active community is winning the crypto game. Bitcoin is still king thanks to its large, ever-growing community. So this is something I tend to lookout for and it's something smaller cap tokens (or shitcoins as most people call them) don't have.
2. Marketcap & Volume: These are 2 key information about any cryptocurrency that I don't play with. Majority of tokens I've seen that have been pumped / dumped / manipulated have small market cap and tiny volumes which makes it easier to carry out such activity. I know that assets do get pumped and drops at some point but there's difference a healthy price movement with retracement than a pump and dump. So I look out for tokens with reasonable marketcap and volume before deciding to trade it.
Can you share what you consider as big caps and mid caps in $numbers just to be clear since we may have a different view on that.
1. Community like what ChainLink has? The Link marines that pumped then dumped the token recently. Setting aside sarcasm or joke, I get what you mean.
2. So again, what is reasonable market cap for you? State in $numbers please.
....In terms of doing some technical analysis, my advice is you can do it to the top 50-100 market cap rankings. And also to those exchanges that got huge trading volume.
At what amount is considered as huge trading volume?
.....I'm only planning to work around coins with 1B market cap and above (highest which is bitcoin would be most preferrable) because I think I'll be more comfortable with them. Coins with large market cap are usually major players thus expected to be reputable and considered strong through the years.
When it comes to the 50th coin you are pertaining about, ICON (am I right?), I might say that it is not a bad choice. I considered it a safe place for investment.
$1 Billion market cap is top 25 from Coingecko's current data.
I intentionally did not put the name of the 50
th since it can go below that rank at any given time.