if you want to strictly invest, buy 500LTC and 50BTC . wait a month, buy more. see how it goes for a month, trade LTC to BTC if you're nervous about the transactions, there's lots of speculative trades, and people will probably be willing to sell/buy either currency at what they perceive is the sky falling down. however, i'd build a mining rig. get a 1x 7970 system for $500-$600, upgrade the PSU, RAM and MB for a quad-CF capable board (for the future, also adds extra spacing for large GPU's), a 1200w PSU and 8gb/16gb RAM, and get 2 extra 7970's and plug them in yourself. as for the case, preferably it needs 200mm fans, and lots of them, it adds a top price of $2000 for a 3 GPU system. e.g. AMD Phenom II X4 945, Gigabyte Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition, Cooler Master HAF 932 Advanced - System Build - PCPartPicker United Kingdom (AMD) or http://uk.pcpartpicker.com/p/PLfN (intel) 1 year later, the extra GPUs will still be ~$200 each on resale, the PC will still be useful, not $600, but more $300 or so. it's less risky, and you'll recover the amount quickly if the build works as intended. at the moment, you'd get $300/month (~200LTC) from a 3 GPU rig running 24/7, costing $120-150/month in power. (give or take whatever the power costs are to run 3x 250w GPUs) the rig would become profitable within a year, to 6 months. (nothing's guaranteed with LTC/BTC) the downside is, a 3x 7950 or 3x 7970 system is a noisy 800w heater on a shelf, running 24/7, but it would get you around 50LTC/week, give or take. This could be offset by solar or alternative energy, or buying GPU's 2nd hand, etc. (And, if you ever get the ASIC's that will be coming down the pipeline any day now... you can add them into the same system, and mine both at the same time. given the budget, ASIC would be there.) it's tough to recommend LTC, as it's a bit like buying copper bars when silver/gold is more readily available, cheaper and easier to trade with. Right now, it would be easier to split the 10k 3 ways, into hardware, LTC & BTC wallets of say 500 LTC/50BTC, which will have a higher resell rate in 3-6 months. fingers crossed. i still recommend building the rig, mostly because, building a rig, will allow you to keep an eye on when the ASIC shift will occur in LTC, and if it's time to stay or shift to BTC's more stable mass of users. this will come down to judgement. To avoid the whole dunning kruger effect (greater fool theory) of speculating on the bitcoin bubble effect, you should be immersed in the numbers and not the rhetoric of BTC/LTC discussion. i.e. as the ASIC devices start to push BTC difficulty higher than 8 million, people will give up on mining with GPU's and migrate to LTC, and then LTC difficulty will rise, and the exchange rate will... spiral up and down as people try to sell their BTC and LTC stock to take advantage of the surge(s). Since the ASIC "purges" haven't really started yet, (i.e. most of the FPGA systems and rack mount systems are not upgradeable to LTC mining, scrypt is wildly different.) and people right now, believe there's still mining opportunity options on BTC mining for small residuals from pools, i.e. 0.0002 values from each 25btc reward, etc. LTC mining hardware is still a good long-term investment for 2013. in 2014, you can sell the hardware and get 1/2 of it back, as well as the 50LTC/week mined, and keep the LTC until the value returns to it's current standard. i tend to believe there's a place for LTC as a mediation currency, i.e. micropayments and exchange/speculation or in off-BTC transactions. as the difficulty changes, 50LTC/week should probably sink down to 40LTC/week, but the $USD could improve as more people start to accept and trade LTC as a separate "coin" for low-value purchasing vs bitcoin's high value transactions. at this point. in theory, you could expect to get 500LTC in 3 months, after spending $1500 or so (may cost closer to $2000, 1200w PSU + 8gb RAM + 200mm fan case).
Is your money divide for investment or for mining? In order to produce litecoin mining, you need to select your strategy?whether go solo or join a pool mining. I hope you have decided by now, and ready for its risks.
