As I have posted in the past, the STEEM price all depends on the userbase growth. Granted the 2 year period SP is locked shields things from large scale sales (other than the liquid STEEM we all have to trust abit not to dump), ultimately the buying pressure from the new users needs to exceed the selling pressure.
Assuming the selling pressure is diluted via powerdown (and making extreme assumption that everybody is always 100% powering down), we end up with the equilibrium point reached when the average one year ago's users selling matches current userbase demand. Of course, this is a very rough approximation and I am sure not 100% is powering down, so the actuals will be better than this metric. Then again there are other factors on the negative side that I am not counting, such as users who just stop steeming.
Anyway, because of this importance I am manually looking at the recent user activity on https://steemd.com/distribution:
3777/12606
4232/13278
4421/13443
4538/13531
4826/13786
The above is a nice growth rate of 30%. Oh, this was just today!
Now today we had poloniex listing and probably that explains a lot of the spike, but regardless it is a nice growth for any day