Bitcoin price drop in the past few days (25/10/12 to 27/10/12) Does anyone have any solid ideas or knowledge on why the price has dropped so much over the past few days? There is a lot of speculation, but nothing I have read to date seems to adequately explain the recent drop. 

The drop is illustrated here, and shows a decrease in price of roughly 14% over the two days:
All you'll ever get is speculation. Nobody knows why prices change.

It's just like when you listen to the news and they tell you that stocks dropped because of "profit taking". Clearly, people were selling if stock prices dropped. But nobody really knows if people were taking profits, cutting losses, or something else entirely.

These are emergent behaviors of complex systems and only in rare cases can you explain price movements. The most popular theory I've heard is that at least one significant factor is BitInstant downtime.