Is Ethereum about to explode, considering the upcoming hard fork on the 18th of January?

It is possible that Ethereum’s price will increase after the EtherZero (ETZ) hard fork on the 19th of January, possible reasons include:

Investors buying Ethereum/Ether (ETH) to increase the amount of free EtherZero they receive (ETH holders will recieve one ETZ for every ETH they own)
Investors could sell the EtherZero after the hard fork and use it to buy more Ether.
Due to the above reasons, Ethereum’s price could rise rapidly (similar to what happened with Bitcoin) and this would attract new investors who want to take advantage of the price increase.
We can look at how hard forks have effected the value of Bitcoin in 2017 to help give us an idea.

Bitcoin doubled in price after the Bitcoin Cash (BCH) hard fork and continued its bull run throughout the year and increased again after the Bitcoin Gold (BTG) hard fork and only slowed down after the Bitcoin SegWit2x (B2X/Bitcoin2x) hard fork was cancelled.

Before the Bitcoin Cash hard fork one Bitcoin was worth about $1,600 and after the Bitcoin Cash hard fork the price for one BTC was $4000, then shortly after the Bitcoin Gold hard fork one Bitcoin was worth over $10,000.

Final Thoughts:

The hard fork could set off a chain of events leading to a rapid rise in Ethereum’s price:

Investors might want to get their hands on free EtherZero Tokens, investors might then sell their EtherZero, other investors might jump in during the price rise and on top of all of that cryptocurrency is becoming more and more mainstream so a lot of newcomers might jump on the bandwagon as well.

Or all of this might not happen, we can only wait and see, in my opinion Ethereum is a great investment regardless of any hard forks.