Looks like we are having a January clearance sale
In all seriousness, alts follow bitcoin. When bitcoin has a bad day, usually alts have a really bad day. When bitcoin stabilizes and starts showing strength, the alts usually come back stronger. Impossible to time perfectly, but bitcoin usually drives the direction.
Hm, I am not sure that you get it. Are you sure that you understand the difference between these two things:
1) All alts are priced in BTC and USD.
If the BTC goes down, it means that the alts will cost less in BTC + plus since BTC is also priced in USD, this means that both the BTC and USD pricings will go down. But this means nothing, since it does not show the dynamics by the alts themselves.
2) Whenever BTC goes up, the community takes out the money out of the alts and invests it into the BTC. Whenever BTC goes down, the opposite should be happening. If you can't see the opposite happening right now, this would mean that it's not the community that's exiting, but the institutional traders - big guys, who bought BTC at 400-500 USD and want to fix their profits right now. It's very hard to those guys to spend the BTC's they've made in their own business models. For instance, it's hard to buy a house in BTC, but it's much easier to convert your BTC into USD and then buy the house. These guys don't believe that the crypto-nomics is around the corner, they don't care. They are here to make some good money. So, whenever they see the correction that we are seeing right now, they prefer to exit this "fishy" market and move into "real estate/oil/and similar stuff" market.
However, the community is quite OK with what's going on here, as far as I understand, as BTC has already shown that it goes down drastically just as it's doing right now only to pop up later on. In this case, it'll go up to 50K or somoething like that.
Why? Well, for one, because I have accumulate a good USD-denominated amount that's sitting at the exchange ready to buy the BTC and 7K or something like that (!!!) whenever I can see the good signs of the recovery in place. I believe that BTC is the new currency of the world and it might as well become this within the next 20 years, whether you like or not...
TBH, I think that BTC can go up to 3 million in 10 years. So, this is just the beginning and it's gonna go up, for sure.