Dow, S&P 500 and Nasdaq rise with monthly gains in sight

Microsoft shares (MSFT) fell about 0.8% early Friday following news late Wednesday that the Federal Trade Commission has opened a wide-ranging antitrust investigation into the tech giant.

But at least one Wall Street analyst says the news comes as no surprise and expects changes at the FTC under the Trump administration will lead to antitrust concerns in tech disappearing.

“With the dark days for the tech industry now appearing to be numbered with Lina (Khan) at the FTC and Trump elected to the White House, it is not a complete surprise in our view that the FTC will close on Wednesday after the bell “I shot Big Tech across the bows from (Kahn) before she left,” Wedbush analyst Dan Ives wrote in a note to clients Friday.

Ives added that this investigation “is much more bark than bite” and will become a secondary concern for the company once President-elect Donald Trump names a new FTC leader.

Current FTC Chairwoman Lina Khan has aggressively pursued antitrust lawsuits against tech giants, including Alphabet (GOOG, GOOGL), Apple (AAPL), and now Microsoft.

Shares of Apple, Microsoft and Alphabet are all underperforming the S&P 500’s 26% year-to-date rise.

Alphabet is currently facing the biggest threat since a federal judge found earlier this year that the company’s Google search engine was operated as an illegal monopoly. Earlier this month, the Justice Department ordered the company to sell its Chrome browser and divest its Android mobile operating system.

After Trump’s election victory, investor optimism grew that these various antitrust threats would disappear under his administration. But some legal experts are less confident, as Yahoo Finance’s Alexis Keenan reports.

For his part, Ives sees the recent era in which regulators sought to restrict Big Tech deals and scrutinize the world’s largest companies as a time that is coming to an end.

“We believe there will be major shifts in policy towards Big Tech in the coming years, with Trump in the White House and Khan at the FTC… we believe it is only a matter of time and a major thorn in the “The side of the tech world,” Ives wrote.

“As someone who spent many years dealing with the technology in the process/soap opera between Microsoft and the US government to finally win Redmond in the 1990s, we believe that the negotiations and remedies are much lower will turn out to be worse than the fears for Google, Apple, MSFT, Meta and Big Tech.