Investing in Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs) were the way to make big money fast in 2017. If you had hopped onto the bandwagon early (first half of 2017), you probably would have made a lot already. Good things don't last for long, though. Economics 101 teaches that whenever there is profit to be made in a market, people will enter and the profit opportunity will decrease until zero and then the market reaches equilibrium.
In the most basic terms, an ICO is a means by which a team collects money from the general public to materialize an idea. Buying into an ICO is buying a hope. Short term view holders buy a hope of capital gains when the token lists on public exchanges. Long term view holders buy a hope that the project will live long enough to materialize into something with real world value that brings in fiat profits.
Before the general public got to know about ICOs and their massive potential gains, those in the private circles could earn big because the only way that the public knew how to get their hands on the tokens of projects they believed in was to purchase them on exchanges. When the tokens list, people rush to purchase them, bidding the price up. Now that the price is high, the people who were holding the tokens before listing can sell at multiple times of the initial value.
Nowadays, ICO private sale and pre-ICO pools are common. People easily get access to the tokens before they are listed on exchanges. So now we all have tokens and are anticipating to flip them once they are listed on the exchanges. Who's going to buy them? What happens when there are more sellers than buyers?
In 2017, when tokens were listing at 5x, 10x, 30x of their pre-ICO prices, the term "moon" got popular. The coin price rose so high, like shooting to the moon. In 2018, tokens can list below the pre-ICO prices. 0.6-0.8x is not a surprise in IDEX (decentralized exchange). Holders either panic sell or pray hard while waiting for the token to list on some main exchange like Huobi or Kucoin where there is more liquidity.
Moral of the story: be very selective when choosing ICOs to enter!