Well, the problem was there was the slew of moderated threads which possibly gave uninitiated people a false sense of the situation.

However, in the grand scheme of things, while the Rptelia followers may have lost a lot of dosh speculating on Monero short term in the longer term I agree with Fluffy that things like the dev team, infrastructure and community make a big difference. Merchants and buyers would prefer security and stability over 'day trading'. What Monero needs above and beyond a high price is what all the Alts need with the exception of BTC and Ripple - that is, easy to use fiat exchanges and easy to use open source shopping cart payment modules. When this happens I can see a big uptake in Monero, Bytecoin and a few other alts.