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Gene Munster says investors should 'buy the fear' in tech

Managing Director & Senior Research Analyst for Piper Jaffray Gene Munster
Brian Ach | LocationWorld 2016 | Getty Images

Donald Trump's fiery rhetoric has presented investors with a rare opportunity to buy into mega-cap internet stocks, closely followed analyst Gene Munster says. 

"We would be buying the fear priced into internet mega-caps, with concerns of President-Elect Trump's impact on tech companies being largely extrapolated from sound bites that are unlikely to manifest during Trump's presidency, in our view," the Piper Jaffray analyst wrote in a note to clients. 

Since the election, large cap internet stocks have sold off even as the broader indexes have rallied on Trump's pledges to cut down on regulation, boost growth and lower taxes. 

Since Trump became president-elect on Nov. 9, Netflix has fallen 5.7 percent, Facebook 5.6 percent, 3.3 percent, Alphabet 3.2 percent and Apple 0.8 percent, according to FactSet data. 

Many tech leaders have been open about their concerns for a Trump presidency's potential impact on their companies. 

Despite campaign rhetoric that would seem to stifle the tech industry, specifically Trump's criticisms of net neutrality, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos and immigration policies, Munster said the Trump presidency will be "markedly different than the positioning" of his campaign. 

"While technology stocks have sold off in the wake of Trump's election, we note that the President-Elect's plan for the first 100 days says absolutely nothing about technology — the industry and financial markets have reacted by intensely analyzing a handful of Trump's scrambled snippets used during his campaign," Munster and his colleagues wrote. 

Piper Jaffray does not think Trump will roll back net neutrality or alter the immigration caps for H1-B visas, which tech companies rely on to get talented international employees stateside. 

Amid heightened fears for big tech, the analysts say, Alphabet, Facebook and Netflix are all attractively priced, adding that "long-term investors should use this pullback as an opportunity to buy long-term secular winners at discounted valuations."