Would this be the first time that bitcoin has lost value in a calendar year?
how is the etf already priced in? wouldn't the news and publicity from the fund going public potentially be a driver of bitcoin price?
ETF is not priced in. Neither is possibility of ebay accepting coin. In fact even Overclock and Newegg are no factored in (very much).
The majority of investors actually have no idea what is really going on in BTC-land and just hopped on to the bandwagon without much thought.
The real driver of price is simply determined by the following equation:
(N - O) * P
N = New users coming in
O = Old users leaving
P = Price velocity over past 30 days (can go either up or down)
It is that multiplication of P that leads to the pattern of exponential growth bubbles followed by corrections. It is unavoidable, it is inevitable, it is extremely profitable for those that understand this simple equation.
For the last few months N has been low enough that N - O was a negative number, this was boosted by all the people that had joined in a short time meaning that O was also a lot larger than normal. This is what led to the recent downward price movement.
The good news is that now O is becoming a lot smaller and N is (slowly) starting to rise again. Once the upward velocity kicks in the positive feedback loop will be re-ignited.