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Vincent Devlin said he was long financials off the back of distressed valuations.

"It would have been very dangerous to be short financials [recently]," he said. "You would have got your fingers burned. Because of the shorting ban, the cost of borrowing to short a financial has also risen."

Autos had received a boost from scrapping incentives, Mr Devlin said, while pent-up European demand would help the consumer goods industry.

Even valuations on select luxury goods companies such as Swatch looked interesting, according to the manager.

"Of the 90 per cent [who remain employed], half might not spend because they're afraid of becoming the 10 per cent, but, at the end of the day, 90 per cent of people still keep their jobs," he said.

"Once the fear of losing jobs recedes, the economy goes back to its normal spending patterns."

Mr Devlin added that, in an era of record-low interest rates, the variable-rate borrowing that helped cause the credit crisis now looked attractive.

He said consumers with variable-rate mortgages in Ireland, Spain and the UK could also be feeling better off as a result of interest rates lowering.

"We have been slower to cut rates, but we're finding European companies with variable debt as opposed to fixed debt," he said.

According to the manager, the cost of new debt is also coming down due to quantitative easing and debt buy-backs.

Nevertheless, he acknowledged European economies had still been hit by the credit crisis. Exporters such as Germany and Italy had suffered from a strong euro, while Spain and particularly Spanish banks had strong exposure to property development, he said.

Elsewhere, fears about peripheral EU economies have resurfaced after the recent failure of a government bond auction in Latvia.