I think, someone with much money AND much BTC wanted the BTC price to rise. So how he can try this without paying too much? Right, try to pump the price on a trusted exchange with the lowest volume, BTC-E
and people comes with btc that have been bought from other exchanges then price falls, not a good finance strategy with one of the most arbitrageable thing on this universe.
to be fair : the other exchanges followed and price is now several dollars up. I think it was quite a good idea to pump btc-e in the bigger picture. We should maybe all start buying on btc-e to get a little bullrun started? Orderbook is very thin and other exchanges follow. Makes sense to me. Also in case the pumper had 20x on margin long on okcoin or was trading on margin long position he could have made a handsome amount of money.