Here are a couple tidbits that may help you:
I notice that many of the largest sell offs end between 7-10 PM US Eastern Time (most likely because some certain % of American traders like to hold cash overnight, especially in a downtrend) I have profited off this trend numerous times, it is very nice when you see it happening
. In price advances, we sometimes get a boost in the morning hours in the United States, and in the nov/dec 2013 bubble, possibly the morning in China as a lot of money flowed in from China.
During Bubble phases, such as march/april 2013 and nov/dec 2013, we experienced "weekend crashes". The massive price rises are caused by many people sending a lot of money to exchanges at once and buying; however since most banks are not open weekends, the inflow of cash is significantly stopped during the weekends, and the price is more susceptible to crashing. Monday morning would mean a lot more cash entering the exchanges and the price would rise rapidly. This "weekend crash" is the most pronounced in times where the price is rising fastest, and I assume it lessens over time as more methods for getting fiat into bitcoins over the weekend emerge.
In terms of price effects of rising difficulty: The difficulty rise once every 2 weeks is expected (as it has gone up every time for well over a year), so I assume this is already priced into the markets beforehand. But it is interesting to look on a longer time frame. Look at the hashrate on a log chart since 2009. You will notice the difficulty spikes during/shortly after the 2011 bubble, then levels out, until the 2013 bubbles which caused the hashrate to spike again. Also notice that litecoins' hashrate flatlined in september, and again in october, and the $ price of litecoin has stopped crashing at roughly the same time. It looks like price bubbles cause a mining equipment arms race, until most of the hashrate is owned by miners who break even or mine at a loss. Then the miners hold a larger % of the mined coins and the price stops falling.
Reasons for price bubblesAlthough I have not heard many people mention this, the block reward halving in late 2012 coincides with the beginning of the uptrend that led bitcoin to $32, where it broke a new all time high. Therefore the block reward halving may have had a massive effect on the timing of the 2013 bubbles. (Since most people just assume it was because of Cyprus, this may not be fully priced in for the next halving
)
When the all time high is broken, a media frenzy starts, and thus the bubble is fueled. This means that most people are only interested in bitcoin for its price - everyone watches it when it is skyrocketing. Go look at the google trends chart for the word "bitcoin"; the 3 spikes you see go along with the three bitcoin bubbles.
Also main reasons for price falling since last november (idk if this will help):A large % of mined coins are sold at market
People are scared of holding large amounts of $ on exchanges for any significant amount of time, after seeing so many exchanges fail such as mt gox
To a far lesser extent merchants instantly cashing out (although large purchases of $250k-$1m+ that get instantly dumped at market will cause a larger effect).
Perhaps manipulation bots on mt gox using fake USD pushing price up in nov/dec, so prices got higher than they would have got in a "normal" bubble, so the downtrend looks bigger.
Also, view my profile, and view my 5th post down, concerning how to time the alt coin markets in the next bitcoin bubble (all run by pure speculation and adrenaline, or human nature) Essentially people profit from the bitcoin bubble, use some of the profits to speculate on alts starting with the ones with the highest market cap, and eventually all of the alts bubble (very generally the lower the market cap the higher the % increase).
