Any thoughts on how we can best position ourselves for the upcoming SMT's?
Participate in the various airdrops that the various SMT related projects are doing.
You can earn more when you participate in these airdrops by using multiple steemit accounts so it is probably a good idea to buy you a few accounts by registering them via blocktrades or via the steemit API if you know how to do this.
Steemhunt is doing an airdrop that had many different phases for example.
They first had a phase where you could only earn by upvoting posts (if you had many steemit accounts then you could upvote plenty and earn plenty of hunt tokens). They then had an airdrop where you could press a shuffle button and win steem hunt tokens in a daily raffel. The more steemit account you had the more you could do this. They also had an aidrop where they awarded users for installing their Chrome plugin (if you had more than one account then you could have done this plenty).
One more tip. As soon as people can sell the ERC version of a token (if it is not yet in SMT form like with steemhunt the tokens will first by distributed as ERC20 tokens) they probably will just dump them on the market and you could pick these tokens up for cheap. You can do a google search for some Ethereum Dex's that allow you to trade tokens. Once you have these tokens you could hold them and then later turn them into SMT's and then depending on what the steemit community is able to do with the SMT you could possibly cash it out or use it to pay for things for example perhaps you will be able to purchase steem monster booster packs with SMT's (I'm not saying you will be able to do this, but who knows maybe the authors of the game decide to make this a feature).
If you look at the crypto scene in general, the whales are the people who were heavily invested from the start, back when nobody took the project seriously.
BTW: This is all my opinion, don't take it as investment advice.