What to Make of BTC, BCH, Altcoins and "Free Money"

In the days running up to the fork, bitcoin recovered a lot of ground it dumped in late July. I (and many others) speculated this was fish/minnows attempting to take advantage of getting "2 coins for the price of 1" while professional traders/whales were conducting a series of shorts / longs to essentially guarantee themselves free Bitcoin cash (BCH) for just the cost of some margin fees (note a quick search of Steemit shows a number of "free bitcoin cash just upload your wallet!!!" posts with only a couple of "here's how to margin short/long to arbitrage your way into bitcoin cash for nothing" posts.

Currently (as of this blog posting) BTC sits at ~$2725 while BCH has bounced around a lot but sits at around $290 for a total combined value of $3015.

Right before the fork, BTC was at $2800. While BCH futures were approximately $340 right before the fork it's hard to accurately take that value into account as

a) the only exchange I'm aware of selling futures was viaBTC which, according to coinmarketcap.com, is right around the 20th most trafficked exchange with 24 hr trade volume of ~$20M (for context the top 3 exchanges did a combined volume over over $1 billion over the last 24 hours)

b) Given the above mentioned steemit post search, I have to believe that a not-insignificant portion of bitcoin holders don't know what a future is, much less how to take advantage of it.

So, BTC was valued at ~$2800 before the fork and is now has a combined value of $3015. That's a 6% increase in 1 day for doing absolutely nothing . So how did that happen?

Option 1: FREE MONEY!!!!!!!!
Bitcoin proved the laws of finance completely wrong and it really is possible create something out of nothing. Financial alchemy / growing money on trees / whatever you want to call, bitcoin has broken down that wall.

This is theoretically possible in the sense that its theoretically possible that the world is run by crab people or that the sun has blown up in the time you've read this. That is, this isn't the case.

Option 2: Market inefficiencies are causing this difference*
I'd buy this even 30 seconds after the first BCH block was found as the Mempool could have filled up so rapidly that arbitrage opportunities hadn't been processed yet. However, at this point I don't think this is the case. While the crypto market certainly isn't as efficient as the stock market (it's not uncommon for there to be multiple dollar price differences amongst exchanges for both BTC and ETH), it's certainly not so inefficient as to allow for a continued 6% price discrepancy. There are sufficient bot-powered day traders looking for arbitrage opportunities to close that gap very quickly.

Option 3: FUD and FOMO are causing prices to go out of whack
I can get behind this theory to an extent. What it generally claims is that we don't have accurate price discovery on either BTC or BCH. The most plausible claim (in my mind) is that people aren't sure if BCH will "moon" and thus are holding onto/buying BCH out of FOMO. However, I see very little evidence that this will happen (granted I'm a non-technical person, but it doesn't look like miners are signaling for BCH and one of the major reasons BTC is so valuable is that it can actually be used as a medium of exchange for tangible goods. BCH can't make that claim.

Additionally, I'd expect professional traders to recognize this as well and put heavy short pressure on BCH to cause it to continue to drop much more than it currently has.

As a counter-argument, I have zero clue how Ethereum Classic has any value as it doesn't seem to have much of a use case - so the markets clearly aren't rational in this regard.

Option 4: Everything was (relatively) properly priced in and there was no FREE MONEY
What this claims is that BTC was priced properly for the fork and that there was no "free money"

I think this is (roughly) the case, though there are elements of Option 2 and Option 3 in there and moving targets that confound the math slightly.

The way to explore this is to compare BTC/BCH pricing to something other than the US Dollar. I compared to Ethereum because it has the second largest market cap and broader price movements roughly reflect BTC price movements. Prior to the fork, 1 Eth was worth .077. Now 1 Eth is worth anywhere from .076 - .078 BTC + BCH (the two prices are combined together because someone who held 1 BTC pre-fork now holds 1 BTC and 1 BCH, while someone who held 1 Eth pre-fork still holds 1 Eth).

Thus, someone holding Eth and someone holding BTC made the same amount of money (relative to the USD) since the fork. No free money rather cryptocurrency in general appreciated (probably because of resolution related to the fork).

SUMMARY
There was no free-money, cryptocurrencies in general appreciated post-fork, and postfork BTC + BCH relative to pre-fork BTC appreciated at roughly the same rate as the rest of the crypto-market. Minor discrepencies are likely the result of an inefficient market (option 2) or FOMO/FUD emotions (option 3).

What does the rest of the community think? Would love to get other options in the comments.