I think the biggest uncertainty is what happens to exchanges on and after august 1st. So the recommendation at this point is to take your coins and move them to a secure personal wallet. I think if you can make a purchase and have the transaction clear prior to the fork date with some time to spare to move your funds than perhaps you should be okay.
Maybe? Depends on how it shakes out. Now is certainly the time to speculate, you've got probably a 1/3 chance of making money off it. The three possible outcomes would be, a) bitcoin never recovers, you lose the money you're speculating with, b) bitcoin recovers and you picked the winning side, congratulations, you bet when everyone was running away and it payed off, or c) bitcoin recovers, but you picked the losing side, you lost your money.
Should you be "investing" in bitcoin right now? Absolutely not, that's a stupid investment, but so far as gambles go there are worse odds.
The scare quotes around "invest" in the parent imply (correctly, in my view) that buying anything with this kind of volatility / lack of intrinsic value is not an investment, rather a speculative bet.
Yeah I have put a pretty significant amount of money into bitcoin and have seen amazing returns. If I thought of it as an investment I'd feel like a fool for not putting more, but as it stands I view it more as a hobby.
Isn't a speculative market driven by gossip and rumors? I think the burden of proof is on you to prove why it is time to buy up BTC as an investment and not a wild gamble.
Sure, the value is highly unpredictable and swings around massively, not to mention the current squabbling that brings the future of the currency into question (not all crypto-currencies mind you, this is specific to bitcoin). Investments have risk profiles associated with them, for most long term investments people expect minimal risk in exchange for minimal rewards. Some more aggressive investment profiles trade more risk for greater rewards. But even the riskiest of investment portfolios pales in comparison to the levels of risk you see in the bitcoin market. Don't get me wrong, I myself have purchased a decent amount of all the crypto-currencies out there, and was one of the earlier purchasers and miners in bitcoin (sadly I lost most of my early mining results when MtGox melted down), but I've also never deluded myself into thinking this has been a wise long term investment, it's a gamble pure and simple. If you go into the bitcoin market investing anything you can't afford to lose at the drop of a hat you're an idiot, whether it pays off or not. Even if it works, that doesn't mean it wasn't a stupid idea in the first place.
If you believe that cryptocurrency will be part of our future, then yes. Otherwise, I don't know. There's also Ethereum and many other alt coins with a total market cap of over $70 billion https://coinmarketcap.com/ .
My personal recommendation would be to have your bitcoins held by a private key you control on Aug 1st. I'd expect tx fees to be pretty bad leading up to Aug 1st as people move BTC out of exchanges.