Most people believe that the price of altcoins' is determined by the price of bitcoin and that they tend to follow it's market movements.
I partially disagree with this. I have studied prices of coins and tokens on CMC and the fluctuations of each currency seems to be unique and independent of any other digital currency. Some show strong pumps when BTC goes down and some heavy dumps when BTC is rising.
Undoubtedly, there are market forces and factors which affects most currencies, this is not influenced by bitcoins price, it rather controls bitcoins' price as well as others.
So when trading or investing, make sure you treat each currency differently as they have different utilities.
It is obvious that if you decide to observe the particular behavior of a cryptocurrency, a series of very specific behaviors that make it unique can be observed over time, but if we observe it in the context of market behavior over a longer period of time, we will notice that as a general rule most of the cryptos do tend to be dramatically affected by the behavior of bitcoin on a global scale. Even in the case of cryptocurrencies that at a certain time experience a large pump or dump when the price of bitcoin remains stable, once they stabilize after that highly volatile event, they tend quickly to stuck to the bitcoin behavior again.