How often does the price get lower than the ICO price when a new coin is listed on its first exchange house ?
How come there are coins that are worth like 0.0004 $, usually during an ICO one coin is sold in the range of 1$ or not ?
Do some "coins" skip the ICO stage ?
There are many factors at play here, so there’s no right or wrong answer.
Market and investor sentiment is important. With the bull market in Dec and Jan and investors looking 100-1,000% gains lots of ICO’s came onto the market with prices 10-20x higher than ICO price and then appreciated further as coins/tokens were hyped on YouTube and Reddit etc - but those gains have mostly been lost now. With the crash and depressed market in Feb and March I would say that coins/tokens have tended to come onto the market at close to ICO price, with higher prices sometimes for projects that were popular and difficult to get in the ICO such as Zilliga, but also lower tier projects coming onto market at up to half the ICO price. In the current market I have observed that the price of new coins/tokens then tends to fall after the first few days of buying interest, often to below ICO price. This can be more marked if there were a lot of air-dropped or bounty coins/tokens that people often sell as soon as they’re listed. So at present there’s no problem I think waiting to buy ICO projects on market.
Be aware that ERC20 tokens are available on an exchange like IDEX within a few days of them being distributed and unlocked after the ICO, and this is the place to get the best price before they are listed on the bigger exchanges where there is often a bump up in price due to more investor interest - the so-called ‘Binance effect’!
The price of a coin/token in an ICO will depend on the number being sold and the hard cap looking to be raised by the project. Some projects will have well under 100 million tokens and some projects will have well over a billion tokens, and some projects will be looking for 10-20 million dollars while other projects will be looking for 50-100 million dollars - so token prices can vary from fractions of a cent to a dollar or two.
And some blockchain projects sell out in their private sale or pre-sale stage before the public ICO stage so that the public crowdsale is cancelled, and then your only option is to buy the coin/token once it’s listed on exchanges if you weren’t in the private or pre-sale that often have higher minimum buy-in limits.
A final thing to remember is that if you do buy a projects coins/tokens in the pre-sale part of the ICO yo get the best deal, then your money will be tied up and unavailable for usually a few months until tokens are distributed and unlocked and can be sold, and there’s no guarantee that the public ICO will reach its soft cap and that the project won’t be cancelled with your money returned later hopefully - and even if the ICO is successful there can be delays with getting coins/tokens onto exchanges where they can be liquid for you, so you will be tying up capital in these uncertain times buying in the ICO and it may be better to wait till you at least know that the coin/token is trading on exchanges and buy then. There’s also the worry in these uncertain times that the market may crash another 50-90%, and you may then be well out of pocket with a coin/token you bought at its ICO pre-sale a few months before in better times, compared to the price you could have got it when it lists after a big crash.