When it comes to the question of investing crypto into this or that ICO one has to review website, White paper, chat with the team members and advisory board, watch official groups in Telegram, Slack, study smart-contract and Bitcointalk thread.
But this is a huge work for one person, taking into account the amount of ICO that is being held lately.
Except for your own study of the upcoming ICO, which sources of ICO reviews and ratings do you trust and why?
There's no need to do all of that with every ICO.
You can make your search far easier if you filter out the majority of coins. It's easy to do this with 2 simple filters:
1) Does the project have anything built? No? Move on. Forget about their big teams and fancy titles. Most projects have these and they cannot prove that they can build anything. Writing software is much more difficult than creating a one-page website or video. Several projects raised multiple millions and still haven't delivered any software. Let me know if you want examples.
2) Is the team from a corrupt country? Yes? Move on. In corrupt countries, ethics and honesty are more lax, which means that they will have a higher propensity to exaggerate or lie.
https://www.transparency.org/news/feature/corruption_perceptions_index_2016The third filter is harder to implement. You need to be able to do critical thinking. Does the application make sense? Jesus coin is an extreme example of something that doesn't make sense, but most are leaning towards this. Crypto currency is good for some applications (transfer or store of value, save fees, save time, gambling) but not all applications.
Most projects are trying to squeeze square pegs into round holes. There's a project that wants to connect locals with travelers to enhance the travel experience. You have to do mental gymnastics to figure out why an altcoin is needed here.
You have "Tokenizing Rising Tennis Stars: tokenstars.com/ace" in your signature. That sounds like somebody is trying to squeeze a square peg into a round hole. Why the hell would you have that in your signature? It's getting close to the Jesus coin.
This ^^^^^. Is right on the money.
Just to add a few more to jlp's excellent advice.
1: Does it solve a "current" real world problem?
2: Are the founders greedy? EG keeping a large percentage of the tokens for themselves. Releasing a huge amount of tokens in total. Is the token sale uncapped (big red flag right there)?
3: Does the token have an intrinsic function of the platform etc? Many ICO's are just tech startup's who cannot get funding via the usual channels (perhaps because it fails the basic test) but then think, hey why don't we add a token to it, and launch an ICO". Once you cut through all the fancy marketing BS you find the real world value of the token is worth the same amount as a recipe for ice cubes. And once you've paid for said cubes, the project evaporates just as quick.
Someone suggested
https://icobench.com/ico/selfpayInterestingly, out of their top 10 projects only two have a working product.
I checked out 5 of my current investments who all have a working product and most scored terribly (under 2.5/5)
Not to overemphasis the point but in real world terms, if someone came to you and said "We have this idea for a new smart phone. It's going to solve this xxxx problem. It's built on a telecommunications network that is 5 years off being useful and by the way, we've never built a phone before and we don't even have a working prototype to show you because as I said, we've never built one before".
This is what most ICO's are asking of investor's which is why most will fail. Heck, I'll be happy if just one of mine pays off but you just never know so never gamble more than you can afford to lose.
One final note. These ICO evaluation sites are all good for one thing. A "quick initial" assessment of an ICO that you may be interested in. Like panning for precious metal, there are so many ICO's being released that it's hard to filter out out the silt and crap and uncover the real gold. Don't rely on just the one resource and as always DYOR to see if it satisfies the above criteria.
cheers
NFI.