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I always expected the LTC and BTC exchange rate to show synchronous tops/bottoms, but to my surprise LTC seems to remains stable during BTC crashes (and vice versa).
Is this because I'm a novice at chart-analysis, or is there really little correlation?
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Assuming that the BTC price is falling against USD, either BTC/LTC will remain stable and LTC will crash proportionately against USD or LTC/USD will remain stable and BTC will crash against LTC or something in between. Otherwise, there will be arbitrage opportunities by changing by using LTC as an intermediary between BTC and USD
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LTC/BTC and BTC/LTC are two currency pairs to look at here. You'll notice that as BTC/LTC goes down, LTC/BTC goes up. Basically what I've observed is that "perceived value" moves from Fiat to BTC to LTC. Meaning people will run up the price of BTC with USD or CNY and that will make BTC more "valuable". Then the price of LTC goes up because it now takes more LTC to buy BTC, since it can be sold for more Fiat, etc.
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Judging by the historic rates of BTC/USD and LTC/USD, they have been well correlated at a daily level, until recently, when bitcoin has diverged from other major altcoins (as per CoinCorrelation.com)
Are you looking at the charts of LTC/USD or LTC/BTC? There should be strong correlation between LTC/USD and BTC/USD, as they are both in the same cryptocurrency boat. I don't know if in practice such correlation is observed. For example if there is much higher variance in LTC/USD it will drown out the correlation. – Meni Rosenfeld – 2013-11-14T10:42:30.797
Yes. And no. Naturally there is some correlation, simply because some people think of it as roughly similar (just think of the inventor's claim of it being the silver to Bitcoin's gold). And naturally there is an unrelated component to their prices, e.g. the likelihood traders associate with this notion ending and only one of them continuing to have significant value. The answer to your question hence only depends on where you draw the line between "sufficient for a yes" and "nothing beyond the obvious, so essentially no." – pyramids – 2013-11-15T09:50:28.597