Both have it's pros and cons.
The pros of buy from ico is it can gives you bonus of altcoins so you can get cheaper price for each altcoin so you can get higher profit but the cons is you need to wait longer time until it listed on exchange and there's a possibility for dev to run away with investor's money.
If you buy in exchanger, you can trade it right away but you might lost the possibility of higher profit as altcoin's price is cheaper if you buy in ico. (except if you're a good trader)
Its good that you jot that because many of the new people here on trading wants to jump in on the ICO's or in a altcoins. I was also worrying for the people who frequently buying from an ICO and submitting in a KYC which is very harmful for your own personal identity that can be used in a fraud. This is a risk over reward ratio, take the risk to buy in ICO or wait it on exchange. Im an investor but if a KYC is needed i keep on not buying any even how legit the project is i rather risk to wait and buy after exchange listing.
Same with you. But it's dilemmatic when it comes to KYC. I personally not so fond of KYC requirement because of the reason you mentioned above. But on the other hand, it can be useful to protect the token owner so if they lost their access to their token either get hacked or another reason, it helps the project team that issued these tokens to knowing who you are, especially in the big ICO like Envion. If you had to join ICO that requires your personal identity then pay attention to the well-known third party company to complete it because ICO that raising hundreds of millions should be able to pay for it.
Both have it's pros and cons.
The pros of buy from ico is it can gives you bonus of altcoins so you can get cheaper price for each altcoin so you can get higher profit but the cons is you need to wait longer time until it listed on exchange and there's a possibility for dev to run away with investor's money.
If you buy in exchanger, you can trade it right away but you might lost the possibility of higher profit as altcoin's price is cheaper if you buy in ico. (except if you're a good trader)
The real bad thing about the ICO is that they are 90% fake and scam and most of the coins from the ICO do not even make to the exchanges. So if this is the case, the second option is much better of altcoin trading. Alteast you know the coin is at the exchange and you can cash out any time by selling at profit or loss. In ICO, if the ico turns to be a failure, no one will buy your collected cheap ICO coins and it will just be a garbage.
I agree with you. I've been in cryptocurrency for 5 months and i witnessed by myself that some of ICOs that looks promising at the begining but ended up scamming the investors.