Kate Mitchell, a partner at venture capital firm Scale Venture Partners, said that if Trump did follow through with protectionist trade policies that made it harder for big American companies to grow, the Trump stock rally would disappear in a hurry.
She predicts that U.S. leaders would lose ground to Chinese tech giants Alibaba and Tencent, the world's sixth and seventh most-valuable tech companies.
"If we have a trade war so that Amazon, Apple and everybody else is being discriminated against globally because we're being so protectionist, Alibaba and Tencent will say, 'Move on over,'" Mitchell said. "They are very interested in taking share away."
After attacking Apple several times during the campaign, Trump told The Wall Street Journal in July that CEO Tim Cook plans to build three plants in the U.S. But there's no evidence that Cook made such a promise, and it would cost Apple a fortune to move iPhone production from China, home to the world's best manufacturing technology for consumer electronics.
"You cannot manufacture smartphones at scale in the United States," said Denny Fish, who invests in tech stocks at Janus Henderson, where he helps manage $4.7 billion. "There's rhetoric from the president, but it's not based in reality in terms of what you could actually do."
Fish, who owns shares of each of the five biggest tech companies, said he hasn't changed his view on the industry since Trump became president, "because the reality is that not much is happening."
In fact, while Trump has touted an "America first" message of economic nationalism, the companies most benefiting during the Trump era are the identical brands that flourished the most under his predecessor. They're winning from the same trade policies that have existed for decades.
"You look at companies like Microsoft, they've pretty much optimized the rules of globalization for 30 years," said Jack Ablin, chief investment officer of BMO Wealth Management, which oversees $70 billion in assets. Despite Trump's campaign pledges, "there are a ton of entrenched interests saying we want things to stay the same,'" he said.
Taxes represent one area where Trump and tech have been on the same page. Heading into the election, Trump's tax repatriation proposal called for allowing companies to bring back the huge sums of cash they hold overseas and pay a one-time tax of just 10 percent, as opposed to the corporate tax rate of as high as 35 percent.
The tax plan that the Trump administration has proposed includes an unspecified repatriation benefit and a corporate tax rate of 20 percent. But those changes haven't happened yet and it's not clear if he's got the votes in Congress to pass the bill.
