A Brief History of the Past Month - A vocal minority forks successfully 

Whether one is opposed to or in favour of the ethereum hard fork, it was clear that the pro-fork forces were a far more organized movement during the period leading up to the forking block.  

They were able to persuade developers of every flavour of ethereum to create their fork, they were able to persuade every mining pool to mine on their chain and they were able to persuade every exchange to trade ether only from their fork.   

This they managed even though there was quite a bit of ambiguity about what the vast majority of ethereum holders and miners actually wanted to do.  There was some voting, but because of the short time frame, confusion and complexity, none of the votes had particularly large turnouts.  

Where we are now - another vocal minority preserves the original chain

But we must remember that blockchains are very anti-fragile systems, and that the only way to snuff out a chain is to stop everyone in the world from mining on it.  

This was the miscalculation of the pro-fork forces.  A very small movement rose up in the last days before the fork proclaiming that they would continue to mine the original "classic" ethereum chain. And that small group kept their word.  

Within a day or two, mining difficulty on their chain had fallen and they were producing blocks at nearly the same rate as the main chain.

And within five days, exchanges decided to trade ethereum classic, ETC.  

Where we are headed - a prolonged and unpredictable battle

It turns out that the occurrence of the fork was not the end game, not checkmate, but merely the ending of the opening of the battle between ETH and ETC.  

Now it needn't be a battle on a technical level.  

But it is a battle for the same reason it was a battle between pro-fork and status quo before.  That is, the pro-forkers are the ones who have a great deal to lose if their fork doesn't endure.  

However, unlike before the fork, when the DAO funds were locked up, on the forked chain all the ether is available for withdrawal, and this creates the window for DAO investors to get their ETH back and to sell it for 10 to 20 times as much ETC.  That's a mighty interesting migration path from the forked chain to the classic chain.  While I wouldn't expect anyone to do precisely that, buying back an amount of ETC equivalent to your holding of ETH with your returned ETH is actually a very interesting hedge.  In fact there's lots of interesting trading positions to take that are different from holding only one coin.

And because there is no more DAO to draw the attention of the community towards new investment opportunities, trading ETH with ETC (and other coins) is about the most interesting thing to watch.

Can the pro-forkers come up with a plan to end ETC or will both chains exist in some state of battle for years or even decades?  Too hard to predict.