Tom Lee: Last week's tech stock sell-off was the final washout, and the market has already bottomed out.

Tom Lee told CNBC in an interview today that last week marked the market bottom, not the start of a deeper correction. First, the market rose on Monday even amid negative news: a flurry of bad headlines over the weekend—including a scandal involving NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang and Texas’ actions against Elon Musk’s company—yet the market rallied sharply. "Rising on bad news" is typically a hallmark of a market bottom. Second, the VIX term structure has normalized after inverting last week. Lee emphasized this "is usually a sign that the market has bottomed out, and it’s far safer than many people believe." For context, VIX term structure inversion occurs when acute market panic and heavy selling drive investors to scramble for short-term protection (such as short-dated put options), causing near-term implied volatility to spike sharply above longer-dated levels (VIX exceeds VIX3M, with a ratio above 1). This results in a downward-sloping curve, a classic signal of short-term stress and a surge in hedging demand.