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If a lot of companies who performed an ICO would actually cash out ether prices would tank pretty fast. There are a couple of paragraphs in the very recommendable Crypto Trader Digest (written by the people of BitMEX) which goes into a little more detail. Liquidity is still very low on all these exchanges so it doesn't take much for panic selling to set in.

I think a lot of money going to these ICOs are people that got into bitcoin/ethereum early trying to diversify their gains with more crypto tokens. Like, the BAT token consisted of 4 whales

its in ETH, not dollars, so it would be quite difficult to convert without slippage because the markets are quite illiquid.

Basically, people trading their ETH paper gains as a diverisification play.

Its in ETH, not dollars.

Oh. This suggests that ETH is way overvalued and illiquid.

We're about to find out how liquid Bitcoin really is. The Mt. Gox bankruptcy trustee has 202,185 Bitcoins and may have to convert them to yen.

ETH is not illiquid per se. Those ICOs just happen to collect 0.1% of all the circulating ETH, imagine you would go to a stock broker with 0.1% of all USD circulating...