Ultimatly what this boils down to is trying to find:
What affects the price = Supply and Demand
What affects Supply = Miners
What affects Demand = Speculators
What affects Miners = Running costs
What affects Speculators = ....
If you can find these answers you will have a better idea of where price is heading.
Didn't mention a single thing about the bitcoin economy and it's use as a currency which is why everyone's dumping when you boil it down.
It got the media attention and all the tech savy people thought they could get rich quickly and out smart everyone but jumping in and just got turned into a giant pump and dump.
Transaction volume (# of transactions) has been over 10,000 transactions a day recently. That is about 3X more per-day than the levels about a month ago. That is among the metrics that will matter at lot more to the future market price (months and years from now) than the day-to-day swings between greed and fear that we've seen over the past couple of months.