Buy at exchange when a project have a bounty campaign or a big airdrop done before the listing because most of this tokens will be dumped. If the project have tokensale but have no bounty campaigns and you think that is a very good project, then you can buy it.
Not as always as you said dude, we must put the total hardcap that has already collected by the project as the main consideration too to determine if do we have a lot of room for room to grow or not?
Look at how TON was loosing more than 30% of its value and it has no a lot of daily trade volumes.
I can say hardcap is really important.
Only a project without a big daily trade volume will be dumped.