I accept that the following is bordering on paranoid wibble...
I just noticed, with the large trade that kicked us back up to 5.85 that the timing is suspicious.
It's suspicious because Mt.Gox seem to kill their live feed process (I hear because of a memory leak) once an hour. The big trade happened seconds before the hour.
Is someone trying to make trades at the exact moment that bots all get disconnected?
Has anyone else noticed what times big trades start?
It seems like MtGox's api disconnects people at every odd hour, most likely to save bandwidth by closing connections to people who would otherwise just keep the api running 24/7 even while not at the computer.
I wouldn't say it is suspicious on MtGox's part, it is just common knowledge that this happens, thus people take advantage of the opportunity. If anything this issue highlights the inherent problems that come about when everybody relies on a single entity to do all their trading, especially in the case of Bitcoin which is supposed to be decentralized.