I had some Lumens left and I need to turn them into BTC before I can go into fiat, that's sort of clumsy and hard to estimate, choosing the best moment.
So in the end, you just do it... then I played around with BTC on the one-minute chart, but that's really boring after two hours or so ;)
You're correct about the alts in general. I'm really looking hard at Ripple right now, I just want the general irritation about Bitcoin out of the way.