The beauty of an uncrowded, non-consensus trade is that once the coin starts pumping and enters a real bullish trend, the majority keeps fading the first leg of the move. Every green candle gets dismissed the same way "meh, just a short-term pump, let's stay focused on the main runners." Then one day the non-consensus trade finally makes it onto the "main coins to hold" list, except now it's 3-4x higher than where they first ignored it.
Zcash is an obvious trade now but whole CT was spitting on it during the first run as well as during the exploit.