Some people were waiting for the "free money" to come so they could buy "alt coins". Some will be happy to see BTC unchallenged. Price will be a balance of both.

Futures on the forked coin were trading north of $1000 earlier today.

After the announcement, the price dropped to $1, and has since rebounded to $200.

https://imgur.com/a/XOvWS

Maybe the $1000 BT2 price wasn't really a bet on free money, but on the prospect that BT2 might replace BTC.

If the expectation was that post-fork BTC + BT2 ~= today's BTC, that means that today's BTC price was depressed by this possibility.

Now that BT2 is cancelled, the value flows back to BTC.

Where is there a market for futures on cryptocoins?

BitMEX, CBOE, Deribit, and others all offer bitcoin futures, with new exchanges appearing all the time.

The Chicago Mercantile Exchange says they'll start trading Bitcoin futures by year-end.

Thank you. I wasn't aware of Chicago Merc. That holds a lot more interest to me than the others. I'll look up your reference to Chicago.

I'll admit it, I was one of those people. On one hand, no "free money" for me, but on the other hand, I'm willing to accept this because it will hopefully lead to a stronger Bitcoin in the long run.

If you bought in when the 2x futures began trading you've already made more from the BTC price rise than you would have from the air drop.

You'd think it would send it down assuming people were buying in anticipating the free coins after the fork. Since there aren't any free coins to get now and assuming that was propping up the recent price rise, why not sell? At least in theory.

edit: First three responses to the question all within one minute of each other with all completely different opinions. That's why it's so difficult to predict these things!

Same way it's going right now? (up)

I assumed the same. Mainly because anecdotally the last dozen people I know who were new buyers knew little about the fork and were mainly buying in via the price-news cycle

Conversely for those who were following this removes the uncertainty around the fork - the downtime of a couple of days, potential 40-50 minute block times, lost coins, replay attacks, etc.