To use an imperfect analogy, you could think of the fork as a spinoff. Example being, for most of PayPal’s life, it was owned by eBay. Every EBAY holder owned the parent company eBay, which encompassed eBay and PayPal. On the day of the spinoff, eBay stockholders received one PYPL share per EBAY share. At the same time, they got to keep their existing EBAY shares. In the simplest terms you could look at the fork like that.

By all means you could just wait and see what happens with Gold and buy in when it hits the market. Though if you go back and look at the bitcoin YTD chart. You can see that in that first couple weeks all Cash did was fall. Until there was a large spike (manipulated or genuine adoption?) and then it crashed. It did end up going up again but has been on a steady decline since.

In the end it comes down to what you believe is the real Bitcoin? Is it Cash? Will it be Gold? Only time will tell. Until then I'll buy and HODL my BTC, along with some other alts of course.