The chart above shows you the typical journey of an ICO's life, as you can see it makes its way from being a project that you hopefully invest into to being a sustainable project worth something and is in demand. But, the real picture is realizing the ups and downs in between those two points. There are several moments from investing in an initial coin offering to when it grows steadily, that will make you think the project is a fail, and it may be your attitude towards ICO's that is making you think that it is a liability to hold onto ICO coins and tokens and just wait for them to increase in value but statistics show that ICO investing can be highly profitable.

Every ICO project starts off with their private/public sale of their tokens or coins which is when the price is going to be the lowest. This is the point that you want to get in and if you really believe in the project hold onto the investment for the long run, the chart shows that this is typically the point that is where the price is going to be cheapest.

Usually from this point you are going to see a steady climb and depending on the price of the ICO it will be 1.5x, 2x, or maybe even up to 10x gains. Call this part the overbought phase, as the chart shows above. Overbought basically means that people are buying in more and more to that project, and in short there is a lot of hype being spread about that coin/token.

Everything can't be perfect forever and eventually moving forward there is going to be a point of decrease, and that is when people are going to sell. Once again look at the chart, this is normal to happen typically, and you shouldn't panic. Instead only realize that it is normal for people to doubt what they bought because of the hype if it helps don't look at the price for a while and continue to hold. However I am going to continue to explain the rest of the phases just so you know how a typical ICO can end up being highly profitable for you.

From this point when you start to see huge drops if you are looking at charts or big price decreases if you are looking at price in a short period of time you can know for almost fact that what is happening is the big investors AKA the whales are starting to sell, it may not be all of them and it won't be everything they bought from the ICO, mainly it is going to be because they are pulling out there initial investments. Remember their have already been pretty big increases and gains made from the ICO to this point of doubt, as the chart shows above.

So now, we are at PANIC or so people think, try to remember that majority of people don't read or do any research, it sounds scary and ridiculous but it is honestly why panic is common during an ICO life span. More selling is happening and that means the price continues to drop, it is like a snowball effect starting from where the doubt first began.

Eventually everything starts to settle and a level of support is found, during this stage the prices are not climbing and are not falling they instead start to move horizontally. The reason why this part of an ICO's life is moving horizontally is because if you have been following along everything explains why this is happening. When a project loses doubters which is a good project (always do your own research) all it is losing is the people who are doing what everyone else is, which is selling. But you are not going to be like everyone else, because you have the knowledge now to know that long term holders of the best projects come out on top.

It's probably been a while since the team of the project has updated the protocol, or said word about what is really happening, and that's to be expected. After all they have been working on the updates, not working on publicity. Price fluctuation is healthy for the overall project and no matter how many people read this or know what is coming in the future fear, doubt and uncertainty is always real enough to scare away investors. A perfect example of an ICO that sort of follows this chart trend and especially does when the team updates it's protocol is NEO. NEO, once they updated and announced they will now be launching ICO's saw huge increases and many more investors meaning prices increasing.

This is exactly the kind of update you want to be looking out for, and it will probably cause big price climbs, and people will be looking to join for the long run. At this point the project is pretty established and the team knows what they are trying to do. Ideas are tangible and prototypes are being tested by the community. We are experiencing real and healthy growth. The kind of growth that makes it worth your while to hold onto an ICO investment for the long run.

Hopefully you liked reading my post and learned a thing or two about investing in ICO's. If you enjoyed this post and think people will find value in it then please share, and upvote to ensure it gets seen. If you have any thoughts at all or points you want to make about ICO investing please leave a comment below.

Until next time please make smart investments and play it safe!