Kind of seems like if you don't manage to jump onboard a new alt-coin in the first day or two you basically lose your ass.. what resources are people using to find the new ones as they're released?
Side note, I think I'm sticking with Vertcoin. It's the only scrypt coin that won't be tanked by scrypt ASICs unless another one forks.
They're usually announced in the Bitcointalk forum for
alternative currency announcements. There's also twitter and a few other places (reddit).
The BTC forum can be a bit much to wade through (lots of launched coins still have threads there, so it's hard to see what's new). On the other hand, anything new that's just bog-standard scrypt will be picked up by profit pools (hashcows, middlecoin, etc.) pretty quickly. Anything more exotic (Max, VTC, etc.) requiring different mining software takes more effort. It's really a tradeoff if you can get in early while difficulty is low, then trade out after the initial spike.
Lately the entire altcoin market is starting to feel like a farce. Most are silly memes or obvious pump-and-dump pre-mines with a few interesting tweaks here and there, but nothing drastic. Nearly every new coin launch these days seems to be following a see-saw pattern where low difficulty makes it the hot commodity for a few days, masses of people pile on, then the value drops, many abandon mining, and the difficulty falls. A week or so later, it's starts another upswing. Rinse and repeat.
Looking at the
chart on coinwarz, the only thing with any stability is BTC (aside from the recent drop). LTC used to be fairly stable, but now it's trending down and starting to cycle--obviously affected by all the scrypt altcoins stealing hashing power. And yet every week there's yet another scrypt coin launched. The whole thing is a massive pile of hope-you-get-rich-quick launches with all the money moving in a giant circle from BTC to altcoins and back.
I'm waiting for a seriously innovative currency to be released that addresses all the major shortcomings of BTC and isn't just another me-too variant with a few tweaks -- if you want to build the next generation currency, merely locking out FPGAs and ASICs isn't going to cut it.
I suspect a true successor will be a long way off. In the meantime I continue to plod along with my aged 6950 on middlecoin and still manage around 0.04-0.05 BTC/day, which is profitable for me. At the very least, there's still money to be made from all the speculation.