Lately, we've seen that investing in crowdsales are no longer profitable due to ICO's favouring VCs and private investors. These set of investors receive heavy bonuses with almost no lock up periods at all. Consequently, they dump these tokens at listing on exchanges and crash the prices below the ICO price, resulting in big losses for smaller investors. As a result, it's difficult to make 5x - 10x from ICO price anymore.
As an investor, one of the best ways to curb this and make ICO's more profitable again is to focus on crowdsales. You have to make a conscious decision to invest in only projects with good lock up periods for VC's and private investors. These lock up periods is what guarantees that the guys with big bonuses don't dump on us. A project with good and experienced team, working product, good token metrics, use case, and considerable lock up periods for VCs and private investor should ordinarily do well in the market.
This is a common problem because ICOs investors will easily dumps their token right after it hits at exchanges for easy money and that's why the project will be affected as the price had already down from the ICO price and this will create panic to other investors and they will also sell their token to cut their losses.
Investing in ICO should be in a long term and investors should wait with the maturity with the project to get a better profits. Trust with the team and the project that this will become huge in the future.