Get your tinfoil hats on! Whomever is manipulating the price to keep it in this narrow range is going to run out of bitcoins eventually ;-)
I hear bitcoin days destroyed is goin crazy so maybe it's some of the early adopters at work... trying to keep the financial apocalypse at bay for just a little while longer...
Close but not quiet there. So Winterflosss' have how many BTC? How about the SecondMarket (think i remember
BTC70K been throwing around). That's a lot of BTC. At the meeting IIRC someone from the panel asked where they get their BTC, answer was muffled early adopters and other sources. I doubt early adopters are business people and what price do you offer them? If it was me to entice i'd offer some % on top of current exchange rate who would pass that up? And dump say 10% of the acquired BTC on the market. 70k bought, 7k BTC are dumped on market to guarantee the lower buying price. Small price to pay so you get as many coins and hold it from CCMFing. It'll continue as long as they'll be major trades off the market while relying on the exchange rates (what else would you use).
Edit: and for early adopter why sell on exchange and loose on slippage when you can sell for a premium and without slippage