Look at multipools to see how miners switch coins automatically.
You may also want to look at reward halvings to see effects in price and hashrate.
Seconded. Find and chat up some multipool operators, and you'll learn a lot. Wrt looking at the halvings: Litecoin is near one now; you'll see that in this board's threads on the coin. From those threads, you'll get some worthwhile members for further questions.
But if you want to understand the markets, you are doomed. It's just gambling. Sometimes manipulated, sometimes random, but always gambling shit.
I believe the polite translation-word for the above is "stochastic."
