If you really want to be able to predict you need to work with things that are so small your own activity in them is a major factor, so that it is largely up to you how well they end up doing.
Otherwise you are just at the mercy of others, including pump and dump groups.
If you pick things where you yourself almost single-handed can really make a difference then even dumps are great for you, because every little step dumpers force the price down they do it by selling to you a step cheaper, so the farther down they dump it the more you get at a cheaper price, if you are lucky you can relatively quickly accumulate a nice percent of the total coins/tokens ever issued or to be issued and become a "whale" in that coin or token.
People will try to discourage you by using "bagholder" as a derogatory term but don't let that phase you, I am fairly sure bitcoin's "bagholders" aren't worried about being called bagholders.
If you pick things that trade against bitcoin itself then whatever you have sitting on the buy side of the order-books is already something decent, not like if it trades against some stupid so called "stable coin" that is actually really a constantly-losing-value coin since fiat is pretty much designed and intended to lose value.
The fact that the so called stable coins are even seen by their issuers as worth bothering to issue and deal in shows that it is not really necessary for an asset to gain value, even constantly losing value suffices to make a profit on the trading of it that presumably is enough to more than offset the constantly declining real value. So obviously things that aren't minting new instances are going to be easier to always keep more than enough of a buy side to buy back all that you initially sold. By finding coins like IXC and I0C that have very trivial minting / recycling-via-miners and that aleady for years upon years upon years have already re-absorbed all or most of the dumpers such as all the coins stolen by all the fly by night exchanges and exchanges that used the oops we were hacked exit-strategy you can build ever upward in price-in-bitcoins thus not only benefit from bitcoin's gains but improve upon them.
The only real predictability is to predict your own stick-to-it-ive-ness, if you know you can do it alone if need be you are in a great position to predict, and of course also because the number of things out there to choose from grows so fast it also makes sense to constantly in the background build up a marketing engine, the viral kind that teaches others to build such engines, so in a few years time you will be able to also keep your chosen coins in the view of a grass roots base of people to whose attention you can know they will be brought.
Long term you don't really need the mass market hype, building a dedicated community is probably more the kind of way your "generational wealth" can build out of all of this...
-MarkM-