I think lite coin will continue upward price trend but slow and steadily as the track record says, major price movement is expected to happen after the halving.
The next LTC halving won't be until August of 2019...
As to the OP, I don't think there have been any changes in the fundamentals, this is just more madness of crowds.
"Madness of crowds" ? You mean FOMO? Eitherway your wrong (and possibly being bitter because you hold any Litecoins).
I think Litecoin has truly arrived as the REAL ALTERNATIVE to Bitcoin in other words it will be the king of ALT COINS. If you look at all the metrics (tx's per day, nodes, CL's twitter followers, reddit subs, GDAX volume, google searches, app store trends) you will realize Litecoin is growing in every possible way and it will explode in price very soon. My bet is Litecoin will easily be worth $1100 by April 2018.