Both type of trading have their perks, with long term you may end up with bigger margin of profit, but you have to be very patient for that, and in short term, you see growing your investment every day even though by a small amount.
But how do you prefer to trade? Especially when trading alts. Do you go with good potential coins and long term investment so you can only cash in when you get to a desired level of profit?
Or do you prefer day trading and go with whichever coin suits on the day.
And what is according to you best practice?
In general, we can't state the proper thing to do especially when dealing in an altcoin trades. Most of the altcoins are experiencing an intentional price movement resulting for heavy fluctuations so even a trader go for long or short, it can wrecked and destroy their trading strategy. And pointing to the coin potential, we will never know until we will put some money there and learn to find the answer by ourselves.
For now, Bitcoin is the only appropriate currency to deal with long term goals as we all know the answer here. There may be some alts that can considered for long term too but I will not state some of them as I don't want to assume all things. We are playing games here in the first place so learn how to deal with all the risk we will encountered.