This is likely the result of the major up trend that happened late last year, which now results to a great down trend afterwards. It's really like ping pong against a wall. The harder you hit it, it will return as hard. So in this case, what happened was that the prices went up pretty high and ended up coming back terribly low.
Another factor is that the prices are going down due to increased supply because of the Mt.Gox liquidation. What happened was that because those coins with them was not accounted for anymore, when they released it back into the economy it resulted to excess supply and that caused the market to have an imbalance in supply and demand. And also because of the sudden fall in prices it also resulted to a mass panic. It caused a domino effect in the market.
That would only mean that the world might not yet be ready for the cryptocurrency revolution as the market is easily affected by bad news and also mass panic occurs whenever there is a down trend like you said. Recently, I have noticed there have been a lot of negative news lately and, I believe, this is also the cause of the price drop. The FUD has been pretty strong since the start of the year, probably because of the whales cashing out and also some people forcing the FUD to bring down the price for purposes of the bitcoin futures.