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Does anyone have any solid ideas or knowledge on why the price has dropped so much over the past few days? There is a lot of speculation, but nothing I have read to date seems to adequately explain the recent drop.
The drop is illustrated here, and shows a decrease in price of roughly 14% over the two days:
All you'll ever get is speculation. Nobody knows why prices change.
It's just like when you listen to the news and they tell you that stocks dropped because of "profit taking". Clearly, people were selling if stock prices dropped. But nobody really knows if people were taking profits, cutting losses, or something else entirely.
These are emergent behaviors of complex systems and only in rare cases can you explain price movements. The most popular theory I've heard is that at least one significant factor is BitInstant downtime.
Look at the humanistic aspects of trading
People are cashing out for christmas...also around Jan 14 as the bills arive you will see the price go down as people cash out (Low Demand)
Mid Jan is great time to buy for a lot of Gold standard currency stocks like BTC
IMHO
Price changes because the relationship between supply and demand is altered. This might take place because of organic or productive demand, or by speculation. Think twice before blaming those damn malignant speculators: they are extremely neccessary. Speculators operate over time or space to smooth out supply sortages or price peaks. Speculators make possible things to reach fair value faster. The answer is at simple as it gets: the bitcoin was overpriced a few days ago.
