From a technical point of view XMR is heavily oversold, at present.

I have been out, ill, for the past ~two weeks.  Now I have a backlog of work to do, and taxes upcoming. But I just had to come here to thank that seller:

Sir, thank you, for selling XMR to me at a marvelous discount.  Without people like you I would be significantly less wealthy.

Last year the facts were profoundly different.  Facts beat pareidolia every time.

I recommend IRC. Anyone with @ prefix on their name is good for escrow.

4% with escrow paid. Or you can try #monero-otc at freenode.net IRC.  You should not attempt this in public.

Poloniex ask + 2.5% is fair.  Because that many will move marketcap by ~5%, and your VWAP should split the difference.

It's just my resting bitch face.  I get that "surely you must be joking" reaction a lot

Cool story, Bro.  Seems legit.  If so, I am imagining something like:  First XMR to 422, then ETH to 3700, then XMR to 500, then ETH to 5000, then XMR to 920.  Which bubble pops first?  You know what I would pick as the sacrificial victim - and it isn't XMR.  It seems like ping-pong-ing funds between ETH and XMR might do some dramatic things to your net worth, if you could time it right.  I might even play that game with some small change, just to say I did it.

And if you're short, they should contribute to you?!

I wouldn't worry about it as long as the usage is primarily speculation.  When there is a real economy, however, you've got to share, or you will be strangling your own golden goose.  I don't have strong principled quantitative criteria.  We're not there yet anyhow.

Getting ahead of the issue can only be good for XMR.  Failing to do so can only be bad.

I could own more XMR than I do.  But I think that if I own too much, then it is bad for the economy and the culture.  Most people don't want to get very wealthy.  Most who do want to get very wealthy probably shouldn't.  Personally, I am trying to maximize wealth because I have a purpose for it, which I consider very important, superceding my personal interests.  But even for that purpose, there is an optimal proportion of the XMR distribution which I seek to own.  If I own more, I prefer to sell.  I currently own too much of the current distribution, but not enough of the long-term distribution, so I feel free to accumulate, in a small way, until I own an optimal proportion of the 18mm XMR distributed before maintenance rewards kick in.  As the economy grows, that notional optimum will decrease over time: When there are goods and services being transacted in XMR routinely, the velocity of the float needs to be reasonable in order for the economy to grow.  If the velocity appears to be a limiting factor, I will definitely distribute, regardless of the price.

Focusing exclusively on maximizing personal wealth is not a good plan, in my opinion.  If you are just going to waste it on hedonic excess, I think you will soon find yourself on a meaningless hedonic treadmill.  The end thereof is death.  Personally, I seek to maximize meaningfulness.  That is a diverse, complex and moving target, but philanthropy certainly helps, as do healthy interpersonal relationships, and a project agenda.

For most people, their income is in fiat.  The amount which they can afford to save in crypto is an amount in fiat.  At some point they will be overweight in XMR, if they save aggressively or if XMR rises 8x, like it did during the past 15 months.  Then they should save less in XMR, to maintain diversification.

If your income and expenses are primarily in crypto, then you should consider accounting in other units, certainly.  I personally tend to mentally convert everything to gold.

All that matters is whether people on balance are buying or selling, and how aggressively.  That's the only "basic" fact that impacts price.  Stuff can stay overbought or oversold for a long time.  Look at November 2013 bitcoin, for example.  Look at SPX from April 2008 to March 2009.  If the buyers/sellers are not technical traders, they don't care what technical indicators are saying.  (And for every bullish technical indicator you produce, I can respond with a bearish one, anyhow.)

The major news in XMR is the hard fork.  It demonstrates that the core team's plan for managing the technical evolution of XMR is viable.  That means XMR can adapt to changing realities.  Unlike some other coins.  I am quite sure that others can enumerate a large number of other new developments in XMR, but this is the one that has me psyched.

I always recommend buying XMR.  I recommend buying it in constant dollar amounts, on a regular schedule, regardless of the price.  It's the only advice I've ever found which works for everyone, no matter how inept they are at timing.  I recommend saving regularly in XMR to several persons each week.  Sometimes I address large groups.  Sometimes I address wealthy people, and sometimes I address poor people.  Buying XMR is good for everyone.  Selling XMR is bad for everyone.  It really is that simple.

Have you ever met anyone who sold XMR and didn't regret the decision later?  If so, were they trustworthy, or a known liar?  I generally find that people who try to convince you to sell XMR are known liars, who like to buy XMR cheaply, at your expense.  Someone just bought several hundred BTC worth of XMR.  I am guessing that they know something that you and I do not know. I am definitely not going to sell any XMR right now (except for a small sum used for market-making, which I buy and sell several times every day).

If you knew the future, you would already have discounted it.  The question is not what is the known news, but what is the unknown news.  I see many events upcoming which will cause XMR to spike.  I know of no events upcoming which are not bullish for XMR.  For example:  The first major DNM to support XMR.  The first Chinese businessman to get a bullet in the head for violating capital controls with BTC.  The first exchange to offer an XMR/fiat pair.  Et cetera, et cetera, ad nauseam.  If you are not holding XMR when these things happen, it will already be too late.

EDIT: Anyhow, the chart looks pretty bullish to me, in the near term:



EDIT: Also, from klee's PnF thread:

I hope to make a much clearer and more cohesive case at a later date, but for now I must work.  The level of emotion and the rhetorical cast of the arguments I am seeing here does not inspire confidence.  Conclusions simply do not follow from the level of desire for an outcome, nor from an intense aversion to alternatives.

It is in progress right now, as we speak.  It starts with a volatility squeeze.

Could you link that here, please?

You really need to distinguish a variety of cases and phases of development in order to apply that reasoning suitably.  

Firstly, we should distinguish application tokens and financial engineering vehicles from cash money.  The end-game for cash money has a well-defined fundamental valuation, with low model risk (Fisher quantity theory), whereas the model risk for app tokens and ponzis is vast, and the best case upside potential is much curtailed relative to cash money.  All crypto is now primarily a speculative vehicle, but BTC at least has a fundamental economy of some size, and that won't change suddenly.

Secondly, we should distinguish the various levels of maturity of cash money.  Gold is mature.  Debt-based national currency under centralized management is experimental, but ubiquitous.  Bitcoin is unknown to 99.95% of the potential user base, and lacks essential features, and development is stagnating.  Monero is unknown to 99.9999% of the potential user base, and lacks essential features, but development velocity is quite respectable.  Clearly the growth potential of XMR is much greater than any other instrument in operation today, if you consider the prospect of becoming the primary international medium of financial exchange to be within the realm of possibility.

The best example of crypto achieving bitcoin mcap is bitcoin, and that took 5 years.  It takes time for money to flow, and the pipes are narrow enough so that back-pressure prevents too rapid a rise in mcap for XMR.  It would take perhaps $200mm influx to bring XMR to parity with BTC.  Poloniex can handle perhaps 20000BTC/diem, max, so it would take at least two months for parity to be achieved, if everyone decided today that BTC was utterly uninteresting, and only XMR mattered.  So, if XMR will be successful similarly to BTC, with no less speed, it will take between 2 months and 3 years to get there.  Meanwhile, there is no particular reason for BTC to decline while XMR ascends.  Quite the contrary, in fact, as buying XMR requires first buying BTC.  By the time XMR reaches USD 420, BTC will almost certainly pass $1k - unless a reliable and accessible fiat exchange or three opens meanwhile.

Once XMR\fiat exchange is safe and easy, then it becomes possible for XMR to supplant BTC in most if not all of its cash money use cases.  Whether it does so will depend on the robustness of the XMR economy, relative to the BTC economy.  As the size of both economies become substantial, the speculative fraction of the value of the tokens becomes much smaller, and hence the impact of confidence is much lower.  Moreover, the transition of a large economy from one medium to another is not going to be instantaneous, so there is plenty of time for users to adapt.  BTC will never go away in any case.  It will just be used less.  It is likely to continue to grow in value even as it is overtaken by XMR.  Only when the XMR economy is substantially larger than the BTC economy does it begin to threaten the value of BTC.  And that might never happen, for all we know.  I personally consider it very likely, because privacy is only increasing in importance over time, and because XMR is much better able to adapt to changing circumstances, by virtue of its release model and team dynamics.

I have to disagree with extreme catastrophic change models, because there is a lot of inertia and the channels for money flows are so narrow.  Huge volatility, yes, always, until the economy dominates over speculative flows.  But stuff takes time, and people adapt.  BTC has strong advocates, and they will keep using it, and keep supporting its value, for a long time to come, no matter how wildly successful XMR should become.

Also, very unlikely.  I expect XMR to gain during the BTC rally over the next two months, and to continue gaining as BTC retraces thereafter.

I went through a period of promiscuous speculation before settling on XMR as the best long-term value store and private transmission technology.  I owned anoncoin, darkcoin, boolberry, and maid during that period.  I have not owned any of these for over a year now.  I speculated in ETH for a bit recently, and rolled gains into XMR.  In general I prefer my diversification to be outside of crypto.  All crypto is far too correlated to constitute diversification.  I do scale between BTC and XMR frequently, while market making, however. 

My knowledge of those coins is largely obsolete, so I will make no comments upon them now.