Price manipulation is an almost natural process in global markets but is very common in the US markets. Price manipulation happens constantly, just before corn was being used to make ethanol at a high scale the price was forced down vis a vis us government forcing corn growers to destroy crop or sell at a lower point to certain companies (for a tax break). Then after 1 big company was ready to sell their ethanol, corn price skyrocketed (from less corn being available from the crop destruction plus company buy offs to create the ethanol they are ready to sell). We see something similar when Asia countries buy scrap metal, when they start buying we raise the price, once they are done we drop the price of scrap metal. I honestly think there's many companies trying to lower the BTC price and it's just causing the price to down it faster.