Asia markets fall as bank stocks retreat under pressure on Wall Street

Sea Limited plummeted nearly 28.7% on Tuesday after the firm missed second-quarter revenue forecasts and said it will be ramping up investments — which could eat into profits.

The Southeast Asian tech giant posted a revenue of $3.09 billion in the quarter, compared with Refinitiv consensus estimate of $3.197 billion.

Total net income in the quarter was $331 million, compared with total net loss of $931.2 million in the same period a year ago.

Forrest Li, chairman and CEO of Sea, said that the firm has “started and will continue to ramp up investments in its core e-commerce business,” in a sign that it is reversing its profitability strategy after months of cost cuts.

— Sheila Chiang

Despite last week’s selloff, the strong rally this year means U.S. markets are now trading at only a small discount compared with the start of the year, says top Morningstar strategist Dave Sekera.

The chief U.S. market strategist told CNBC’s “Squawk Box Asia” on Monday that he expects returns to be “much more muted” for the rest of the year.

In fact, now’s a good time to be selling and locking in profits on some stocks that have “run up so much [they] are now overvalued and overextended,” he said.

He named six such stocks to sell, and told investors to buy five names instead.

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— Weizhen Tan

HSBC has identified 9 ‘unloved stocks’ listed on the London Stock Exchange that could be poised to surge over several factors.

The investment bank said UK markets have started to outperform other global indices for the first time this year since the release of the UK’s June inflation data on July 18.

The bank’s strategists said that the basket of 9 stocks had strongly outperformed the broader FTSE 350 over the past two months, returning 9% compared to a 0.6% decline for the benchmark.

CNBC Pro subscribers can read more here.

— Ganesh Rao

Rather than slowing into recession, the U.S. economy is actually gaining significant steam in the third quarter, according to the latest projections from the Atlanta Federal Reserve.

Following an update Tuesday, the Fed district’s GDPNow tracker of incoming data is pointing to growth of 5% for the July-through-September period. That’s up from the previous estimate of 4.1% a week ago. Should it hold, that would be the fastest growth since the fourth quarter of 2021.

The upward revision followed retail sales data from the Commerce Department showing that spending grew 0.4% in July, pushing the estimate for personal consumption expenditures growth to 4.4% from 3.2%. Consumer spending accounts for about one-third of all U.S. economic activity.

—Jeff Cox

Retail sales data for July came in higher than expected in a sign of continued consumer strength.

The indicator of food service and retail sales grew by 0.7% in July from last month. Economists polled by Dow Jones anticipated a relatively modest 0.4% month-over-month increase.

Excluding automotives, sales grew by 1%. That notably exceeded economists’ forecast of 0.4%.

— Alex Harring

Fitch warned it may have to downgrade dozens of banks, including JPMorgan Chase. The agency already cut its rating on the industry back in June, but another downgrade would force it to reconsider the ratings on the more than 70 banks it covers.

“It’s not inevitable that it goes down,” analyst Chris Wolfe said. “We could be at AA- for the next 10 years. But if it goes down, there will be consequences.”

— Fred Imbert, Hugh Son