I believe that Ripple rising up so much is also due to the fact that new comers see it as "being cheap", in the sense that it was only 1$ to own a coin a week or so ago. Other people analyzing that new comers would see it this way, they wanted to make some quick money analyzing the sentiment of the crowd and went in: Self-fulfilling prophecy. I would not invest in Ripple now. I don't own any. I used it to cash-out $50 because it was the cheapest & fastest option (I wanted to see how cheap/fast I could cash-out). But then again, who knows what it will be worth in 1 month.

I never thought the black market would be this big. What you write makes me want to double down on one of my bet. There is this coin, Zclassic, that is going to transform into BTCP (Bitcoin Private), where each owner of Zclassic and each owner of BTC will receive 1 BTCP. So owning 1 Zclassic now is like predicting the price of Bitcoin Private if everything go as planned. The fork is supposed to happen before february. It's risky, but the market seems so big that maybe there is place for a new player.