I like Ethereum but if you want to invest $1000 you will do better to buy 3-4 new or cheap tokens, with potential to rise. Psychologically when people see token going from $0.002 to $0.01 they don't get "scared" of the price, but this is multiplying 5 times your investment. For you to get the same thing from ETH you have to go from $1348 (price at the moment) to $6740 and there would be barriers all the way. I can see ETH going $2000 and after that, big dump with the price falling to $1800 maybe $1600. We can see the same with Bitcoin. It can't break the $20 000 barrier, even through we saw that price in December, before the big dump and the price falling to 13k (Bitcoin at the moment is 14 600).
pp. if you decide to invest in tokens with lower price. Read their whitepapers, view their developers and the developers GitHub, facebook, twitter. View their subforum at reddit if they have one. View the thread at bitcoin talk or their forum if they have one. If you find lively community and real people behind the project and you like the project generally you can invest but never invest all your money in just one project.