some say the price is just returning to the pre Hearn level.
what role might exchanges and their 'internal' trading be having on the price, and are there figures that show the percentage of trades that are entirely 'in-house'?
On the CNY exchanges, the exchanges which tend to lead BTC most of the time, you can be rest assured that the vast majority of trading on these places is in-house bot trading. There is a whole level of trading that occurs on a different dimension, whereby 500 BTC bids will flicker up out of nowhere and dissappear just as quick.
As for the western exchanges, in my signature is a link to a critique of a whole $30 pump, followed by a $30 dump, on both counts lead by trading on Bitfinex. The only reason for the market to have moved in the way that it did, was sharks running Short Stops, and then wiping out Long Stops on the way back down. i.e. basically dipping into traders accounts by deploying a bit of 'funny numbers' bot trading...
....and when I say sharks, I suspect that the main benficiaries of these sort of front running, stop farming antics, are the exchange operators themselves....
check this mugshot of Mr Bitfinex himself:
I mean, that is one avarice crazed looking motherfucker, right?
Bitcoin is unregulated finance so what sort of people is Bitcoin likely to attract? In Bitcoin, unscrupulous financial sharks are free to practice all the kinds of antics that they could end up in jail for if they got caught doing in other markets. Bitcoin is the wild west, and shady, corrupt, fraudulent exchanges are to be expected, I am afraid.
Unlike Mt Gox however, when these exchange sharks start pumping n dumping with fabricated volume, they tend to more or less balance the books at the end of the day. Only difference is that there are a good bit more BTC/USD in the exchange sharks/operators accounts and a good bit less BTC/USD in thier customers accounts, but their BTC:FinexCoin or USD:FinexBuX ratio will still be more or less 1:1.