Do small investors, retail traders ever “win” on IPOs these days?

Just a random thought popped into mind.

I haven't bought into a new company, an IPO, in a long long time. In part, it's because it seems that small investors get shafted on most. I found myself recalling how things were 20 maybe 30 something years ago. You'd hear about a company that was doing well that wanted to go public. You'd call up your broker and let them know you wanted in. And, sometimes it was all up from there. If the company was indeed great, they'd get a good influx of money to expand and everyone from executives to employees to retirement funds to even smaller individual investors would share in the rewards.

But these days it seems very, very different. An IPO now means that only the top executives and special investors who get preferred shares ahead of everyone else, they don't just make millions, they make billions, and then it's down hill from there, with common shareholders having funded… well… not so much the growth of the company, but rather the padding of the pockets of the people at the top. And the companies' stock just slides down, down, down, down. Maybe it comes back up a bit over years, sometimes many years, but sometimes never.

Oh, and sometimes after a company lingers at bottom dollar valuations for a while some private equity company swoops in and buys back your shares, which you lost so much money on, but at a “premium” to the dismally low current price. And, they may even do this to the same company more than once, take it public, get a bunch of money from retirement fund managers and small investors, plummet the valuations, take it private again, and then another IPO or maybe restructure debts and rename the company or trade to another private equity company that just does the same thing under a new name. Half the time if you look behind the curtain and trace down the funding, it seems that blind retirees via their retirement plans' fund managers are the largest “investors”, but they're truly just getting bled.

Am I missing something, false memories? Do small traders have a chance for large gains in today's IPOs or just big losses, especially if they don't get out quick once the slide starts?