The Litecoin woke up some hours ago and went from +/- 4$ to +/- 8$
There are some exchanges that allow btc/ltc , ltc/usd and ltc/eur exchanges - even on some (i.e. bitfinex) you can do margin trading with Litecoins.
And there is localLitcoins.
An interesting aspect of Litecoin is that it uses
Scrypt as hashing algo (Bitcoin uses sha265) - which, as mentioned above, makes it harder (or less usefull) to develop Asics for mining them.
You can find more info on
http:/litecoin.org