I am not going to make friends with this analysis. Ripple is for sure very controversial in the cryptosphere
However, the case is not all black, and those who says that it is a scam are just as speculative as those who says it has or will have a use.
Let's look at the 3 points
Catalysts : ripple is the first private blockchain/ledger designed for banks. It is highly centralized as more or less 60% of the coins are pre mined and held by the makers. This alone is enough to scare a lot of frightened cats. However, this also has upsides. The current crypto market as a whole is gone completely mad with FOMO, and while we might still be far from a real crash (or not, who knows when the music stops, but it's rather sooner than later now), the centralized aspect of XRP might be seen by a decent % of the the population as a safe haven (liberty is awesome on paper, but many run to papa when things gets real)
The sentiment is overall very bad, xrp being the ugly duckling of cryptos, but this has been priced in already with a huge retracement and 6 months downtrend. Yet the price holds spectacularly well. This should remind you of BCH and a lot more. Vicious or not, we are here to take profit, not to be right. The need for B2B (business to business) crypto payement is real, and even *if* banks don't ever use xrp, it might still be useful as a kind of paypal 2.0 for private business. Also, escrow lockup of most XRP is schedule for the end of the year
To be noted, SWIFT is already making its own blockchain, and former ripple founder of XML is trying to eat some chunks of market from ripple. Market is big enough for all of them, but these should be watched for the investors.
Fundamentals : Hard to say, since all is private. But what do we know for sure ? The protocol works exceptionally well and is, for now, hack proof. IF xrp get announced with a use, or as a necessity, or as the first "asset to share holding shift paradigm", we can expect a huge bump, from all of those who were afraid of the XRP / Ripple difference. Ripple being centralized, it has the potential to attract of a lot of business who dislike both banks and pure public chains. IT guys could see xrp in a (very big) niche somewhere between "do it yourself linux" and "windows"
One possibility being that ripple wants to control XRP's price to be stable, and this would make xrp a very good low risk long term investment
TA : we are looking at a wave 4 ABCDE classic triangle compression, with a 0.30$ bullish breakout confirmation, and 0.18$ accumulation. XRP/BTC is at the lowest since a long time, and got rejected at 0.00002500, so we are in a low risk high reward situation. Min projection is 0.6$ for completition, with potentially higher targets marked with the red rectangles
trader : accumulate now at 0.22-0.23, sl at 0.21$, TP 0.26$, 0.29$, 0.39$ (2-3 days)
swing : sl at 0.185$, TP at 0.29, 0.39, 0.58$, 0.89$ (before april 2018)
investor : sl at 0.17$, TP at 0.58$, 0.89$, 1.15$, or hold forever, depending on fundamentals and risk aversion