This is the epitome of the “Three-Day Rule”:
Day 1 : The smart, big money sells.
Day 2 : The semi-smart, kinda big money sells (like … at 9:30 a.m. ET) because they see what happened yesterday and realize that it’s prudent to lighten up.
Day 3 : The not-so-smart, small money sells because … they’ve been watching the carnage over the past two days and have been largely frozen. And after two days of declines, they can’t take it anymore. So they sell! Note that this Day 3 dumb-money selling can often occur at the end of Day 2 – i.e., like, um … right now!
So after the lowest common denominator (i.e., the uninformed, not-so-smart traders) has sold, the way is cleared for stocks to move higher.