LTC will probably repeat history... at first the manipulative whales will hold back the rise just to raise tension, and then it will suddenly be released, creating an very fast surge upwards.
It was exactly like that during the last couple of days with 9.5-10$
just to add something here, Litecoin distribution seems more fair than Bitcoin's distribution, while more than 45% is held on addressed from 0-10000 LTC and only 34% are held from addresses with 100000-10000000 in which 2 of these addresses are owned by BTC-e and OKcoin, this means only exchanges hold 23% of people's Litecoins.
this brings us to 70% held by small holders like me.
beside the huge development and marketing going around Litecoin, the fact of the distribution compared to Bitcoin's distribution, and the fact that I dont have to worry about satoshi's coins or the stolen coins from Mtgox.... is really attracting
Source:
http://bitinfocharts.com/top-100-richest-litecoin-addresses.htmlhttps://i.imgur.com/K5rmEGc.pngI don't know exactly about distribution, but the insider whales at BTC-E are kind of dumb brutes, who should learn more refined methods for market manipulation then fake 2mil.$+ buy/sell walls. Things like that make people turn away from LTC. The market will always be manipulated, but just don't be so damn obvious when you do it.
In the general idea, I agree that LTC probably has a bright future.
I'll quote myself here, what I posted couple of days ago when talking about Houbi accepting LTC.
It will increase the LTC trade volume and will cause it's price to rise. There will probably be a very fast rise,similae to the previous spikes. Over time LTC will gain more traction and it will probably be traded on Bitstamp soon, because Stamp will start losing volume to BTC-E, because of the good arbitrage options between China. Because of the same base source-code, it will be simple for all the service companies to adopt LTC usage.
The future for LTC is probably bright.
In the future, it will be easier to sell LTC then BTC, because it has less criminal history, publicly known creator and scrypt having it's advantages in hash rate growth stability and in not being made by the NSA, that isn't currently an very popular organization.