I think there is a ton of profit to be made in terms of Token Sales. The issue is getting through all the noise to find ICOs that have a real business model, solid team and the social media capacity to raise awareness about their product.
3 years ago there was this joke in Silicon Valley that startups could add AI to anything and raise huge amounts of investment capital. Most ICO's are doing something similar - adding "decentralization" , "blockchain" or "cryptocurrency for XYZ industry" and raising money through Token Sales.
Assuming you have done all that research, i would say real profit happens in Private / Pre-sale. The discounts can be soo massive, that you can potentially get a 4x- 5x return on your investment. The only thing is that you need to remember to sell all your tokens the second the ICO gets listed on a public exchange.... Otherwise have fun waiting for the coin value to go back up.
P.s. It sucks being in the US. We keep getting screened for KYC and not allowed to invest.