The halving was already priced in because it was an expected event months before it was going to happen.
In part, you are right. The speculation on the halving is, in my opinion, the reason why the BTC price went up the whole first half of 2016.
The halving itself is not too important for the price: As I've pointed out several times in this forum, the only thing it did is that it lowered the growth of the money supply, but this growth is still is about 5% per year.
Bitcoin's fundamentals have changes since 2013 due to the growth of the dark markets and the increase in its use for criminal activities. The demand has grown. Let us all agree with that simple assumption.
I don't know if criminals are the reason, but that the demand has grown cannot be negated. At blockchain.info there are some interesting charts: block size, transaction volume (in transactions) and total paid transaction fees have grown strongly in 2016. All three are indicators of demand growth, but most notably the last one, because it means that the transaction volume growth was not due to spam increase (like in previous peaks) but because of real transactions because people are agreeing to pay slightly higher fees now.