Yeah but now that manipulation is very difficult for not saying impossible, bitcoin doesnt depend on one exchange now and the volume is big enough to not be manipulated to easy by 1 or 2 people.
What, about 10,000 BTC per day on a major exchange? That's about US$ 5,000,000 of trades per day.
So a small hedge fund with, say US$ 25 million to play with could utterly dominate the BTC market for a week or more?
Meanwhile, the volume of trading in Apple shares alone, yesterday, was US$ 2.8 billion.
http://www.nasdaq.com/aspx/dailymarketstatistics.aspxHo ho.